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Minimum Number of Substrings From a String Needed to Piece Together Another String
By vamaddur, history, 7 years ago, In English

Given two non-empty strings A and B composed of lowercase Latin letters, what is the minimum number of substrings of A needed to form string B? The lengths of A and B are at most 100000. If the task is not possible for a given input, output a rogue value (a.k.a. -1).

I was thinking about solving this with an O(N^2) DP method, but that does not fit into the time limit of 5 seconds.

Please help, and thanks in advance!

EDIT: Note that chosen substrings can overlap. I put some cases below.

Input #1: abcbcd abcd

Output #1: 2

Input #2: iamsmart iamdumb

Output #2: -1

Input #3: asmallmallinmalta atallmallinlima

Output #3: 5

Explanations: "abcd" = "ab" + "cd", no "d"s in the first string of Input 2, "atallmallinlima" = "a" + "ta" + "llmallin" + "li" + "ma"

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7 years ago, # |
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    7 years ago, # ^ |
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    Can you elaborate on the use of the data structure?

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7 years ago, # |
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Could you provide the problem link?

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