387 First Unique Character in a String

We need to find the first unique character in the given input string. For this, we iterate over the string and create a frequency map/array. I usually like to use a size 26 array, if I am given only lowercase or only uppercase string. A map is easier to go with if it’s a case-sensitive string.

We first create the frequency map. Then iterate over string again and check if the the current letter has a frequency of $1$, if so return this index.

Note: in Python, ord() is used for getting the integer Unicode representation of a character. See docs.

Code:

Python

class Solution:
    def firstUniqChar(self, s: str) -> int:
        count = [0] * 26
 
        for c in s:
            count[ord(c) - ord('a')] += 1
 
        for i,c in enumerate(s):
            if count[ord(c) - ord('a')] == 1:
                return i
 
        return -1

Big O Analysis

• Runtime The runtime complexity here is $O(N)wheren=len(input\_arr)$ as there are no nested loops and we have visited the characters of source and target strings once in a loop.
• Memory The memory usage is $O(26)=O(1)$ since we have arrays of size 26: so, constant space!

— A

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