Count Length-3 Chat Substrings with a Vowel

Last updated: July 2, 2026

Quick Overview

The question asks the candidate to count the number of substrings of length three from a given string that contain at least one vowel.

Hudson River Trading
Coding & Algorithms
Software Engineer
Hudson River Trading
July 2, 2026
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
Coding & Algorithms
Medium

2

0

21 solved


The question asks the candidate to count the number of substrings of length three from a given string that contain at least one vowel.

This question is typically asked during the technical screen to evaluate a candidate's problem-solving and coding skills. The interviewer is looking for the candidate's ability to think critically about string manipulation and to implement an efficient algorithm. The question also assesses the candidate's understanding of vowels and substring operations, which are fundamental in many programming tasks.

What the Interviewer Expects
  • Clearly define the problem and requirements.
  • Outline an efficient approach to solve the problem.
  • Provide a working implementation in Python.
  • Explain the time and space complexity of the solution.
  • Discuss edge cases and how they are handled.
Key Topics to Cover
String manipulation
Substrings
Vowel identification
Algorithm efficiency
Edge cases
How to Approach This
  1. Clarify input constraints and edge cases before writing code.
  2. Walk through your approach verbally and confirm with the interviewer before coding.
  3. Start with a brute force solution, then optimize. Mention time and space complexity.
  4. Test your solution with examples, including edge cases like empty input or duplicates.
  5. Consider common patterns: sliding window, two pointers, hash map, BFS/DFS, dynamic programming.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • How would you modify your solution to count substrings of a different length?
  • Can you explain how you would handle special characters in the string?
  • What would you do if the input string is extremely large?
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Sample Answer
Approach

To solve the problem, we need to iterate through the string and check each substring of length three for the presence of vowels. We can maintain a count of valid substrings as we go through the string...

Algorithm

We will use a simple loop to extract each substring of length three and check if it contains at least one vowel. Here is the Python implementation:

def count_length_3_vowel_substrings(s): ...

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