Sliding Window or Multi-Pointer Optimization | Dataford Interview Questions

Meta IT receives a chronological stream of support event categories from its internal service tooling. Given the category for each event, find the length of the longest contiguous window containing at most k distinct categories.

Use a sliding window or multi-pointer approach that runs in O(n) time.

Formal Specification

Implement longest_support_window(events, k).

Input: events, a list of integers where each integer identifies an event category, and k, a non-negative integer.
Output: An integer representing the maximum length of a contiguous subarray containing at most k distinct values.
If k is 0, return 0.

Constraints

0 <= events.length <= 100000
0 <= k <= events.length
0 <= events[i] <= 10^9
The returned window must be contiguous
The input order must not be changed

Function Signature

def longest_support_window(events, k):

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