Complex Coding Practice: Strings and Arrays | Dataford Interview Questions

A VMware vSphere telemetry component needs to identify the first character that appears exactly once in an event label and find two metric values that add to a target threshold. Implement both operations in one function.

Given a string s, an integer array nums, and an integer target, return a dictionary with:

unique_index: the zero-based index of the first character in s whose total frequency is one, or -1 if no such character exists.
two_sum: the zero-based indices of two distinct elements in nums whose values add to target, or an empty list if no pair exists. Return indices in ascending order.

Character matching is case-sensitive, and indices refer to Python string positions. The same array element cannot be used twice. For this problem, assume at most one valid Two Sum pair exists.

Constraints

1 <= len(s) <= 10^5
2 <= len(nums) <= 10^5
-10^9 <= nums[i], target <= 10^9
Character matching is case-sensitive
There is at most one valid Two Sum pair

Function Signature

def find_unique_and_two_sum(s, nums, target):

Your question is Complex Coding Practice: Strings and Arrays. Start with the requirements in the Question tab.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

Problem