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Smallest Proportion Character Substrings
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Smallest Proportion Character Substrings

HardSQL · PostgreSQL

Problem

Given a list of strings, select the strings where the most common character has the smallest proportion in its string. Asked in the Onsite coding round 4 stage. If multiple strings tie, select all; return a string of the characters only present in the selected strings.

Output

  1. One row per selected string, excluding NULL and empty strings.
  2. Return selected_string, max_common_character_proportion, and exclusive_characters.
  3. exclusive_characters must contain characters appearing in at least one selected string and no unselected string, sorted lexicographically and concatenated without separators.
  4. Order by selected_string ascending.

Schema

strings
ColumnTypeDescription
string_idPKINTUnique identifier for the input string
input_stringVARCHAR(255)String to evaluate
Tablesstrings
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