Minimum Number of Steps to Make Two Strings Anagram II

Ah, the age-old dilemma of making two strings anagrams of each other! It’s like trying to convince your cat to take a bath—both are equally challenging and often leave you questioning your life choices. In this problem, we are tasked with transforming one string into another by removing characters. Think of it as a digital decluttering session, where you need to toss out the unnecessary bits to achieve that perfect harmony (or anagram) between two strings.

Problem Description

You are given two strings, s and t. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to determine the minimum number of steps required to make s and t anagrams of each other. A step is defined as removing a character from either string. So, if you have a string that’s a chaotic mess of letters, you need to figure out how many letters you can toss out to achieve that sweet, sweet symmetry.

Solution Links

Before we dive into the code, here are some handy links to solutions in other languages:


class Solution:
    def minSteps(self, s: str, t: str) -> int:
        count = collections.Counter(s)
        count.subtract(collections.Counter(t))
        return sum([abs(c) for c in count.values()])

Approach

The approach here is as straightforward as it gets. We utilize the Counter from the collections module to count the occurrences of each character in both strings. By subtracting the counts of the second string from the first, we can easily determine how many characters need to be removed to achieve an anagram. Finally, we sum up the absolute values of the counts to get our answer. Simple, right?

Time and Space Complexity

Complexity Type	Complexity
Time Complexity	O(n + m), where n and m are the lengths of strings `s` and `t`, respectively.
Space Complexity	O(1), since the size of the character set (in this case, the English alphabet) is constant.

Real-World Example

Imagine you’re at a party, and you’ve brought a fruit salad. However, your friend shows up with a completely different fruit salad, and you both want to combine them into one perfect bowl of fruity goodness. To do this, you need to figure out how many fruits you need to remove from each salad to make them identical. This is essentially what our code is doing—removing the unnecessary fruits (characters) to create a harmonious blend (anagram).