Problem Description
You are given a string s of even length. Split this string into two halves of equal lengths, and let a be the first half and b be the second half. Two strings are alike if they have the same number of vowels (a, e, i, o, u, A, E, I, O, U). Return true if a and b are alike. Otherwise, return false.
Key Insights
- The string length is always even, allowing a straightforward split into two halves.
- We only need to count vowels in both halves and compare the counts.
- Vowels include both uppercase and lowercase letters, so we should account for both cases.
Space and Time Complexity
Time Complexity: O(n), where n is the length of the string, as we need to iterate through each character to count vowels.
Space Complexity: O(1), as we are using a fixed amount of space for the counts and do not require additional data structures that scale with input size.
Solution
The solution involves splitting the string into two halves and counting the number of vowels in each half. We can use a simple loop to iterate through the characters of the string, checking if each character is a vowel and incrementing the respective count based on whether the character is in the first half or the second half. Finally, we compare the two counts and return true if they are equal, or false otherwise.