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15 - Minimum Window Substring

Jira Ticket: LND-122
LeetCode: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring
Pattern: Sliding Window
Difficulty: Hard
Status: To Do
Priority: Medium

Labels: Hard, Sliding_Window
Created: 2025-08-21
Last Updated: 2025-08-22

📝 Problem Statement

Problem URL: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring Problem Description: Given two strings s and t of lengths m and n respectively, return the minimum window substring of s such that every character in t (including duplicates) is included in the window. If there is no such substring, return the empty string "". The testcases will be generated such that the answer is unique. Example 1: Input: s = "ADOBECODEBANC", t = "ABC" Output: "BANC" Explanation: The minimum window substring "BANC" includes 'A', 'B', and 'C' from string t. Example 2: Input: s = "a", t = "a" Output: "a" Explanation: The entire string s is the minimum window. Example 3: Input: s = "a", t = "aa" Output: "" Explanation: Both 'a's from t must be included in the window. Since the largest window of s only has one 'a', return empty string. Constraints: m == s.length n == t.length 1 <= m, n <= 10^5 s and t consist of uppercase and lowercase English letters. Difficulty: Hard Category: Sliding Window

🤔 Initial Thoughts

Understanding the Problem

  • What are we asked to find/compute?
  • What are the inputs and outputs?
  • What are the edge cases?

Pattern Recognition

Why Sliding Window?

What clues in the problem point to this pattern?

💡 Approach

Brute Force (if applicable)

Idea:

Time Complexity: O(?)
Space Complexity: O(?)

Optimized Approach

Idea:

Algorithm Steps: 1. 2. 3.

Time Complexity: O(?)
Space Complexity: O(?)

🎨 Visual Explanation

Example: 

Step 1: 
Step 2: 
Step 3:

💻 Implementation

# Your solution here
def solution():
    pass

Code Explanation

🧪 Test Cases

Test Case 1: Basic Example

Input: 
Expected Output: 
Actual Output: 
Status: ⏳ Not Tested

Test Case 2: Edge Case - Empty Input

Input: 
Expected Output: 
Actual Output: 
Status: ⏳ Not Tested

Test Case 3: Edge Case - Single Element

Input: 
Expected Output: 
Actual Output: 
Status: ⏳ Not Tested

📊 Complexity Analysis

Time Complexity: O(?)

Breakdown:

Space Complexity: O(?)

Breakdown:

🎓 Key Learnings

What I Learned

Mistakes I Made

Pattern Insights

  • When to use sliding window:
  • When NOT to use this pattern:

🔗 Similar Problems

📚 Resources

✅ Progress Checklist

  • Problem understood
  • Pattern identified
  • Brute force solution
  • Optimized solution
  • All test cases pass
  • Complexity analyzed
  • Code reviewed
  • Learnings documented
  • Jira ticket updated

Status: 🔴 Not Started
Last Updated: 2025-08-22