Secret vs Guess String Counts | Dataford Interview Questions

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Problem

Tala needs to score a candidate verification string against a secret string. Given two strings of equal length, count characters that match both the value and position, then count remaining characters that exist in the secret but appear at different positions.

Each character occurrence can be matched at most once. Exact matches must be removed before counting misplaced matches, and repeated characters require careful frequency tracking.

Formal Specification

Implement score_guess(secret, guess):

Input: Two strings, secret and guess, with equal length.
Output: A two-element list [exact, misplaced], where exact is the number of matching characters at the same index and misplaced is the number of remaining guess characters that occur elsewhere in secret.

Characters are case-sensitive. The input contains only lowercase English letters and digits.

Constraints

1 <= len(secret) == len(guess) <= 10^5
Characters are lowercase English letters or digits
Duplicate characters may appear
Each character occurrence can be matched at most once

Function Signature

def score_guess(secret, guess):