You are given a string s
consisting of lowercase English letters, and an integer k
.
Your task is to delete some (possibly none) of the characters in the string so that the number of distinct characters in the resulting string is at most k
.
Return the minimum number of deletions required to achieve this.
Example 1:
Input: s = "abc", k = 2
Output: 1
Explanation:
s
has three distinct characters: 'a'
, 'b'
and 'c'
, each with a frequency of 1.k = 2
distinct characters, remove all occurrences of any one character from the string.'c'
results in at most k
distinct characters. Thus, the answer is 1.Example 2:
Input: s = "aabb", k = 2
Output: 0
Explanation:
s
has two distinct characters ('a'
and 'b'
) with frequencies of 2 and 2, respectively.k = 2
distinct characters, no deletions are required. Thus, the answer is 0.Example 3:
Input: s = "yyyzz", k = 1
Output: 2
Explanation:
s
has two distinct characters ('y'
and 'z'
) with frequencies of 3 and 2, respectively.k = 1
distinct character, remove all occurrences of any one character from the string.'z'
results in at most k
distinct characters. Thus, the answer is 2.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 16
1 <= k <= 16
s
consists only of lowercase English letters.