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Ransom Note Letters Problem
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Ransom Note Letters Problem

HardPython

Problem

A CME Globex monitoring tool must determine whether an operational note can be assembled from letters appearing in a collection of magazine titles. Each title may be selected at most once, and all normalized letters from a selected title are available. Return the smallest number of titles needed and their zero-based indices.

Normalize both titles and the note by keeping only English letters a-z and converting uppercase letters to lowercase. Letter order does not matter. If multiple minimum-size selections exist, return the lexicographically smallest list of indices. If the note cannot be formed, return [-1, []].

Formal Specification

Implement min_titles_for_note(titles, note), where titles is a list of strings and note is a string. Return a two-element list [count, indices], where count is the minimum number of selected titles and indices is the corresponding sorted index list. For an empty normalized note, return [0, []].

Constraints

  • 1 <= len(titles) <= 20
  • 0 <= len(note) <= 20,000
  • Each title contains at most 1,000 characters
  • Titles and notes contain printable ASCII characters
  • Only letters a-z contribute after normalization
  • A solution may require all titles

Function Signature

def min_titles_for_note(titles, note):
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