Rearrange Characters to Make Target String

Problem Description

You are given two 0-indexed strings s and target. You can take some letters from s and rearrange them to form new strings. Return the maximum number of copies of target that can be formed by taking letters from s and rearranging them.

Key Insights

• Count the frequency of each character in both strings.
• Determine how many times each character in target can be formed using the characters from s.
• The limiting factor will be the character in target that can be formed the least number of times from s.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(n + m), where n is the length of s and m is the length of target.
Space Complexity: O(1), since the character count arrays are of fixed size (26 for lowercase English letters).

Solution

To solve the problem, we will use a hash table (or an array) to count the frequency of each character in both the string s and the string target. The solution involves the following steps:

1. Create a frequency count for the characters in s.
2. Create a frequency count for the characters in target.
3. For each character in target, calculate how many times it can be formed from the characters in s by dividing the frequency of that character in s by its frequency in target.
4. The answer will be the minimum of these values across all characters in target.

Code Solutions