Given a string of length n. Find the minimum number of possible cuts after rearranging the string (if required), such that each cut is a palindrome and length of every cut is equal. That is, find the minimum number of palindromes of equal lengths that can be obtained by partitioning the given string if rearrangement of string is allowed before partitioning.
Examples:
Input : string = "aabaac"
Output : 2
Explanation : Rearrange the string as "abaaca"
and cut into "aba" and "aca"
Input : string = "aabbccdd"
Output : 1
Explanation : Rearrange the string as "abcddcba"
This is a palindrome and cannot be
cut further.
If we observe carefully, our problem reduces to calculating characters with odds and even counts. Below are the possible cases,
- If the characters present in the string have only even counts then the answer will be 1 as we can rearrange the entire string to form a palindrome.
- If there is only one character with odd count, then also the answer will be 1 as we can
rearrange the entire string to form a palindrome. - If there is more than one character with odd count, then we will create two separate list of characters - one for odd characters and one for even characters. Now, if we notice that if a character has odd count then if we subtract 1 from it, the count will become even. So we will insert the element with odd counts only once in the odd list. We will insert the elements with even counts (evenCount/2) times, i.e. half of their count in the even list. Now our problem is to uniformly distribute the even count elements among odd count elements to form palindromes of equal length. Suppose the list of even count characters is even and odd count characters is odd. If even.size() is divisible by odd.size() our answer will be odd.size() otherwise we will transfer elements from even list to odd list until even.size() is divisible by odd.size().
Below is the implementation of above idea:
Time Complexity: O(N2)
Auxiliary Space: O(N)
