Common Characters

L2 Easy Strings

Concept

Treat a string as a collection of characters and the same set tools apply — even for words.

Return the number of distinct letters that appear in both s and t. A letter shared just once still counts as one.

Examples

▸ s = "read", t = "dear"

→ 4

▸ s = "cat", t = "dog"

→ 0

▸ s = "ape", t = "apple"

→ 3

Progressive Hints

Hint 1 · Nudge

Once a string becomes a bag of characters, the same set tools from numbers apply.

Hint 2 · Plan

Treat each string as a set of its characters, compute the intersection of the two sets, and return its size.

Hint 3 · Approach

charsS = set of s's characters; charsT = set of t's characters. Return the size of their overlap.

Output

// Run your code to see the output here.