LeetCode 1165, Easy. Topics: Hash Table, String. View on LeetCode.
Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 15 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:
Problem
There is a special keyboard with all keys in a single row.
Given a string keyboard of length 26 indicating the layout of the keyboard (indexed from 0 to 25). Initially, your finger is at index 0. To type a character, you have to move your finger to the index of the desired character. The time taken to move your finger from index i to index j is |i - j|.
You want to type a string word. Write a function to calculate how much time it takes to type it with one finger.
Examples
Constraints
- keyboard.length == 26
- keyboard contains each English lowercase letter exactly once in some order.
- 1 <= word.length <= 10^4
- word[i] is an English lowercase letter.
Solution
Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:
Complexity
NeetCode All. Last modified on September 7, 2026