String Manipulation Coding | Dataford Interview Questions

The Wellmark member portal receives searchable text and required benefit-code patterns. Given a source string s and a target string t, return the shortest contiguous substring of s that contains every character in t, including repeated characters. If no such substring exists, return an empty string.

Character matching is case-sensitive, and the result should be the leftmost shortest window when multiple windows have the same length.

Formal Specification

Implement min_window(s, t).

Input: two strings, s and t.
Output: a string containing all characters from t with the required multiplicities.
Return "" when s does not contain all required characters.

Constraints

1 <= len(t) <= len(s) <= 10^5
s and t contain printable ASCII characters
Repeated characters in t must be matched separately
Return the leftmost window when minimum windows have equal length

Function Signature

def min_window(s, t):

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