[Solved] Given a string s and a character c that occurs in s, return an array of integers answer where answer.length == s.length and answer[i] is the distance from index i to the closest occurrence of character c in s.

Question

Given a string s and a character c that occurs in s, return an array of integers answer where answer.length == s.length and answer[i] is the distance from index i to the closest occurrence of character c in s.

The distance between two indices i and j is abs(i - j), where abs is the absolute value function.

Example 1:

Input: s = "loveleetcode", c = "e"
Output: [3,2,1,0,1,0,0,1,2,2,1,0]
Explanation: The character 'e' appears at indices 3, 5, 6, and 11 (0-indexed).
The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 0 is at index 3, so the distance is abs(0 - 3) = 3.
The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 1 is at index 3, so the distance is abs(1 - 3) = 2.
For index 4, there is a tie between the 'e' at index 3 and the 'e' at index 5, but the distance is still the same: abs(4 - 3) == abs(4 - 5) = 1.
The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 8 is at index 6, so the distance is abs(8 - 6) = 2.

Example 2:

Input: s = "aaab", c = "b"
Output: [3,2,1,0]

Constraints:

• 1 <= s.length <= 104
• s[i] and c are lowercase English letters.
• It is guaranteed that c occurs at least once in s.

Python Solution

class Solution:
    def shortestToChar(self, S: str, C: str) -> List[int]:
        res = []
        pos_c = []

        for i in range(len(S)):
            if S[i]==C:
                pos_c.append(i)

        for i in range(len(S)):
            m=99999999
            for j in pos_c:
                m = min(m,abs(i-j))
            res.append(m)

        return (res)