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This is a medium difficulty Coding & Algorithms question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Meta.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Meta during technical interviews.

Select words to maximize unique characters

Q: Select words to maximize unique characters

This question evaluates understanding of combinatorial search and string manipulation, specifically the ability to reason about unique-character constraints, subset selection, and set-like representations.

Problem

You are given an array of strings words. You may choose any subset of these strings and concatenate the chosen strings in any order.

Your goal is to produce a concatenated string that contains the maximum possible number of unique characters, subject to the constraint that no character appears more than once in the concatenation.

Return any valid concatenated string (or equivalently, any subset) that achieves the maximum number of unique characters.

Input

words: string[]

Output

A string s such that:
- all characters in s are unique
- |s| is maximized among all valid choices

Examples

words = ["un","iq","ue"]
- One optimal answer: "uniq" (length 4)
words = ["aa","bc","d"]
- "aa" cannot be used (has duplicate a ), optimal answer could be "bcd"

Constraints (typical interview assumptions)

1 <= words.length <= 16 (or small enough to allow backtracking)
Total characters across all words is moderate (e.g., <= 200)
Characters are lowercase English letters (state assumptions if asked)

Problem

You are given an array of strings words. You may choose any subset of these strings and concatenate the chosen strings in any order.

Return any valid concatenated string (or equivalently, any subset) that achieves the maximum number of unique characters.

Select words to maximize unique characters

Quick Overview

Problem

Input

Output

Examples

Constraints (typical interview assumptions)

Comments (0)

Select words to maximize unique characters

Quick Overview

Problem

Input

Output

Examples

Constraints (typical interview assumptions)

Comments (0)