3110. Score of a String - Explanation

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Description

You are given a string s. The score of a string is defined as the sum of the absolute difference between the ASCII values of adjacent characters.

Return the score of s.

Example 1:

Input: s = "code"

Output: 24

Explanation: The ASCII values of the characters in the given string are: 'c' = 99, 'o' = 111, 'd' = 100, and 'e' = 101. The score of s will be: |111 - 99| + |100 - 111| + |101 - 100|.

Example 2:

Input: s = "neetcode"

Output: 65

Constraints:

• 2 <= s.length <= 100
• s is made up of lowercase English letters.

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1. Iteration

class Solution:
    def scoreOfString(self, s: str) -> int:
        res = 0
        for i in range(len(s) - 1):
            res += abs(ord(s[i]) - ord(s[i + 1]))
        return res

Time & Space Complexity

• Time complexity: $O(n)$
• Space complexity: $O(1)$