How to find smallest substring which contains all characters from a given string?

Question

I have recently come across an interesting question on strings. Suppose you are given following:

Input string1: \"this is a test string\"
Input strin         


        

Answer 1

C# Implementation:

public static Tuple FindMinSubstringWindow(string input, string pattern)
{
    Tuple windowCoords = new Tuple(0, input.Length - 1);
    int[] patternHist = new int[256];
    for (int i = 0; i < pattern.Length; i++)
    {
        patternHist[pattern[i]]++;
    }
    int[] inputHist = new int[256];
    int minWindowLength = int.MaxValue;
    int count = 0;
    for (int begin = 0, end = 0; end < input.Length; end++)
    {
        // Skip what's not in pattern.
        if (patternHist[input[end]] == 0)
        {
            continue;
        }
        inputHist[input[end]]++;
        // Count letters that are in pattern.
        if (inputHist[input[end]] <= patternHist[input[end]])
        {
            count++;
        }
        // Window found.
        if (count == pattern.Length)
        {
            // Remove extra instances of letters from pattern
            // or just letters that aren't part of the pattern
            // from the beginning.
            while (patternHist[input[begin]] == 0 ||
                   inputHist[input[begin]] > patternHist[input[begin]])
            {
                if (inputHist[input[begin]] > patternHist[input[begin]])
                {
                    inputHist[input[begin]]--;
                }
                begin++;
            }
            // Current window found.
            int windowLength = end - begin + 1;
            if (windowLength < minWindowLength)
            {
                windowCoords = new Tuple(begin, end);
                minWindowLength = windowLength;
            }
        }
    }
    if (count == pattern.Length)
    {
        return windowCoords;
    }
    return null;
}