LC 451. Sort Characters By Frequency

Alen Alex · February 13, 2024

LeetCode Link: 451. Sort Characters By Frequency
Language: C#

Problem Statement

Given a string s, sort it in decreasing order based on the frequency of the characters. The frequency of a character is the number of times it appears in the string.

Return the sorted string. If there are multiple answers, return any of them.

Examples

Example 1:

Input: s = “tree” Output: “eert” Explanation: ‘e’ appears twice while ‘r’ and ‘t’ both appear once. So ‘e’ must appear before both ‘r’ and ‘t’. Therefore “eetr” is also a valid answer. Example 2:

Input: s = “cccaaa” Output: “aaaccc” Explanation: Both ‘c’ and ‘a’ appear three times, so both “cccaaa” and “aaaccc” are valid answers. Note that “cacaca” is incorrect, as the same characters must be together. Example 3:

Input: s = “Aabb” Output: “bbAa” Explanation: “bbaA” is also a valid answer, but “Aabb” is incorrect. Note that ‘A’ and ‘a’ are treated as two different characters.

Constraints

  • 1 <= s.length <= 5 * 105
  • s consists of uppercase and lowercase English letters and digits.

Solution

public class Solution 
{
    public string FrequencySort(string s) 
    {
        var pq = new PriorityQueue<char, int>();
        var dict = new Dictionary<char, int>();

        foreach (var c in s)
        {
            if (!dict.ContainsKey(c))
            {
                dict[c] = 0;
            }
            dict[c] = dict[c] - 1;
        }

        foreach (var k in dict.Keys)
        {
            pq.Enqueue(k, dict[k]);
        }

        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        while (pq.Count > 0)
        {
            var c = pq.Dequeue();
            var k = Math.Abs(dict[c]);
            for (int i=0; i<k; i++)
            {
                sb.Append(c);
            }
        }

        return sb.ToString();
    }
}

Complexity

Time Complexity: O(N)
Space Complexity: O(N)

Twitter, Facebook