Practice/Meta/Leetcode 1446. Consecutive Characters

Leetcode 1446. Consecutive Characters

CodingOptional

Problem

Given a string s containing only lowercase English letters, find the length of the longest consecutive sequence of identical characters. In other words, determine the maximum number of times the same character appears consecutively in the string.

Requirements

1. Return an integer representing the length of the longest streak of identical characters
2. The string contains only lowercase English letters (a-z)
3. Handle edge cases including single-character strings
4. Consider that multiple streaks may exist—return the length of the longest one

Constraints

• 1 ≤ s.length ≤ 500
• s consists of only lowercase English letters
• Expected time complexity: O(n) where n is the length of the string
• Expected space complexity: O(1)

Examples

Example 1:

Input: s = "aaabbcc" Output: 3 Explanation: The character 'a' appears 3 times consecutively at the beginning, which is the longest streak.

Example 2:

Input: s = "abcdef" Output: 1 Explanation: All characters are different, so the longest streak is 1.

Example 3:

Input: s = "zzzzz" Output: 5 Explanation: The entire string is one continuous streak of 'z'.

Example 4:

Input: s = "aabbbccccdddeee" Output: 4 Explanation: 'c' appears 4 times consecutively, which is the longest streak in the string.