1239. Maximum Length of a Concatenated String with Unique Characters

Medium

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You are given an array of strings arr. A string s is formed by the concatenation of a subsequence of arr that has unique characters.

Return the maximum possible length of s.

A subsequence is an array that can be derived from another array by deleting some or no elements without changing the order of the remaining elements.

Example 1:

Input: arr = ["un","iq","ue"]
Output: 4
Explanation: All the valid concatenations are:
- ""
- "un"
- "iq"
- "ue"
- "uniq" ("un" + "iq")
- "ique" ("iq" + "ue")
Maximum length is 4.

Example 2:

Input: arr = ["cha","r","act","ers"]
Output: 6
Explanation: Possible longest valid concatenations are "chaers" ("cha" + "ers") and "acters" ("act" + "ers").

Example 3:

Input: arr = ["abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"]
Output: 26
Explanation: The only string in arr has all 26 characters.

Constraints:

• 1 <= arr.length <= 16

• 1 <= arr[i].length <= 26

• arr[i] contains only lowercase English letters.

class Solution:
    def maxLength(self, arr: List[str]) -> int:
        return self.recursive(arr, 0 , '')
    
    def recursive(self, arr, start, path):
        max_length = 0
        for index in range(start, len(arr)):
            if len(path + arr[index]) == len(set(path + arr[index])):
                this_length = len(path+arr[index])
                l = self.recursive(arr, index+1, path + arr[index])
                max_length = max(max_length, l, this_length)
        return max_length