Formatted question description: https://leetcode.ca/all/2186.html

# 2186. Minimum Number of Steps to Make Two Strings Anagram II (Medium)

You are given two strings s and t. In one step, you can append any character to either s or t.

Return the minimum number of steps to make s and t anagrams of each other.

An anagram of a string is a string that contains the same characters with a different (or the same) ordering.

Example 1:

Input: s = "leetcode", t = "coats"
Output: 7
Explanation:
- In 2 steps, we can append the letters in "as" onto s = "leetcode", forming s = "leetcodeas".
- In 5 steps, we can append the letters in "leede" onto t = "coats", forming t = "coatsleede".
"leetcodeas" and "coatsleede" are now anagrams of each other.
We used a total of 2 + 5 = 7 steps.
It can be shown that there is no way to make them anagrams of each other with less than 7 steps.


Example 2:

Input: s = "night", t = "thing"
Output: 0
Explanation: The given strings are already anagrams of each other. Thus, we do not need any further steps.


Constraints:

• 1 <= s.length, t.length <= 2 * 105
• s and t consist of lowercase English letters.

Similar Questions:

## Solution 1. Counting

// OJ: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-steps-to-make-two-strings-anagram-ii/

// Time: O(N)
// Space: O(1)
class Solution {
public:
int minSteps(string s, string t) {
int cnt[26] = {}, ans = 0;
for (char c : s) cnt[c - 'a']++;
for (char c : t) cnt[c - 'a']--;
for (int n : cnt) ans += abs(n);
return ans;
}
};


## Discuss

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-steps-to-make-two-strings-anagram-ii/discuss/1802576