Task: ENCODING

En oding

day 3, sour e le en oding.*, available memory 256 MB CPSPC 2004, June 10

In most programming languagues, string onstants an ontain hara ters not a essible dire tly
from the keyboard. This an be a hieved by using a spe ial marker symbol, usually a ba kslash.
Sometimes there are more spe ial symbols having dierent fun tions. Most of the string is read
verbatim, as it is, and the rest is interpreted in one way or another.
Prof. P. Entropi , a famous omputer s ientist, has his own ideas on this. He believes that using
a xed symbol (or a xed set of symbols) as a marker is extremely inexible and annot be the best
solution. For what if you need to en ode a string with many ba kslashes?
Professor has invented a dynami oding method, in whi h verbatim and interpreted parts of
the string are de lared expli itly. The idea is to introdu e an additional marker, whi h marks the
beginning and the end of every verbatim part of the string. The symbol that is used for this marker
is dynami , i.e. it an hange inside the string. At the beginning of the string there is no marker
and the symbols are interpreted. As soon as some symbol x appears twi e in a row, it be omes
the spe ial marker and the xx just read is dis arded. From now on, every appearan e of x swit hes
between the verbatim mode and the interpreted mode. If some other symbol y appears twi e in a
row anywhere in the interpreted mode, the marker is hanged to y, and so on.
For example the string `` ab ab aa bb aa '' is read as ``abABaaCC'', where the apitalized
part of the string is interpreted and the rest is read verbatim.
Prof. Entropi needs to know how e ient dynami oding really is in terms of spa e. He has
gathered a representative sample of strings with parts marked verbatim and interpreted. He
wants to nd the shortest possible en odings of these strings using the dynami oding method.
Your task is to write a omputer program that does exa tly that.

Task
Write a program, that:

 reads the size of the alphabet and a string from the input le,

 nds the shortest en oding of this string, and

 writes this en oding to the output le.

Input
The rst line of the input le en oding.in ontains a single integer k , 2  k  26  the size of the
alphabet. The alphabet onsists of the rst k letters of the standard english alphabet. The se ond
line ontains a string to be en oded. The part to be read verbatim is written with small letters and
the part to be interpreted is written with apital letters. The length of the string is at most 100 000
hara ters.

1
Output
The rst and only line of the output le en oding.out should ontain a single string  (one of )
the shortest en oding(s) of the input string using the given alphabet.

Example
For the input le en oding.in:
3
abABaaCC
one of possible orre t answers is the le en oding.out:
ab ab aa bb bb