PROBLEM OF THE DAY : 24/09/2024 | Smallest window in a string containing all the characters of another string

Welcome to the daily solving of our PROBLEM OF THE DAY with Karan Mashru We will discuss the entire problem step-by-step and work towards developing an optimized solution. This will not only help you brush up on your concepts of Sliding-window but also build up problem-solving skills.

Given two strings s and p. Find the smallest window in the string s consisting of all the characters(including duplicates) of the string p.  Return "-1" in case there is no such window present. In case there are multiple such windows of same length, return the one with the least starting index.
Note : All characters are in Lowercase alphabets. 

Examples:

Input: s = "timetopractice", p = "toc" Output: toprac Explanation: "toprac" is the smallest substring in which "toc" can be found.

Give the problem a try before going through the video. All the best!!!
Problem Link: https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/smallest-window-in-a-string-containing-all-the-characters-of-another-string-1587115621/1