September 6, 2023 3 min to read

Merge the Tools! - HackerRank Python Solution

Merge the Tools! is a medium-difficulty problem that involves string manipulation. We will learn how to solve this problem in Python through a step-by-step tutorial.

Disclaimer: We encourage you to solve this challenge yourself before reading our tutorial. We have provided a detailed explanation of the problem and our solutions to help you check your work.

Problem Statement

Merge the Tools! is a medium-difficulty problem that involves string manipulation. The problem statement is as follows. String s of length n is composed of English letters. We have to divide the input string into n/k substrings where each substring contains k characters.

Input Format:

• The first line contains a single string, s.
• The second line contains an integer, k, where k is the factor of n. n is the length of the string s.

Output Format:

• Print n/k lines where each line has the k unique characters from string s.

We have to divide the string into n/k substrings where each substring contains k characters. We have to remove any subsequent occurrences of non-distinct characters in each substring.

For example, the given string is AABCAAADA and the k is 3. The string is broken into 3 substrings and the characters of each substring should be distinct.

• AAB
• CAA
• ADA

As we can see the first substring is AAB and the characters are A and B. The second substring is CAA and the characters are C and A. The third substring is ADA and the characters are A and D.

We have to print each substring on a new line after removing the duplicate characters then the final output will be.

• AB
• CA
• AD

Merge the Tools Solution in Python

Explanation of Solution

• The merge_the_tools() function takes two arguments: the string string and the integer k.
• The function first iterates over the string string in steps of k.
• For each step, the function creates a substring of length k starting from the current position in the string.

• The function then sorts the characters in the substring using the sorted() function. The sorted() function takes a list as its argument and sorts it in ascending order.

• The function then removes any duplicate characters from the substring using the set() function. The set() function takes a list as its argument and returns a set containing the unique elements of the list in index order.

• The function then joins the characters in the substring using the join() function. The join() function takes a list as its argument and returns a string containing the elements of the list joined by the separator string.

• The main() function is responsible for getting the input from the user and calling the merge_the_tools() function. The function first gets the string string and the integer k from the user. Then, it calls the merge_the_tools() function to merge the tools in the string and print the result.

Test Case of The Merge the Tools Solution