Don't be ashamed of N^2 IV
If you look at the constraints for this problem, the length of the string is 1000. You can solve it in N^2 with a constant of 26, which means O(26N^2) which would mean 26,000,000 steps. That's totally feasible and you shouldn't be ashamed if it gets the job done - and fast enough. Code is down below, cheers, ACC. Longest Balanced Substring I - LeetCode You are given a string s consisting of lowercase English letters. A substring of s is called balanced if all distinct characters in the substring appear the same number of times. Return the length of the longest balanced substring of s . Example 1: Input: s = "abbac" Output: 4 Explanation: The longest balanced substring is "abba" because both distinct characters 'a' and 'b' each appear exactly 2 times. Example 2: Input: s = "zzabccy" Output: 4 Explanation: ...