Button Press Program | Dataford Interview Questions

A Bosch Rexroth operator panel records button identifiers as operators interact with a machine. Given the recorded button presses and a command sequence, find the starting index of the first contiguous occurrence of that command in the log.

Return -1 if the command sequence does not occur. If it appears multiple times, return the earliest starting index. Button identifiers are case-sensitive integers, and a button may appear more than once in either input.

Formal Specification

Implement find_button_press_sequence(presses, command).

Input: presses, a list of integers representing the recorded button presses, and command, a non-empty list of integers representing the target sequence.
Output: An integer containing the first zero-based index where command begins in presses, or -1 when no match exists.

Constraints

1 <= len(command) <= len(presses) <= 10^5
0 <= presses[i], command[i] <= 10^9
Return the earliest valid match
The target sequence is non-empty

Function Signature

def find_button_press_sequence(presses, command):

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