Kth distinct string in an array leetcode 2053 python

certainly! the problem of finding the kth distinct string in an array is a common one in coding interviews and competitive programming. here, i'll provide you with a detailed explanation of the problem, followed by a python solution to tackle it.

### problem statement
you are given an array of strings and an integer `k`. your task is to find the kth distinct string in the array. a string is considered distinct if it appears only once in the array. if there are fewer than `k` distinct strings, you should return an empty string.

### approach to solve the problem
2. **filter distinct strings**: extract the strings that appear only once (i.e., the distinct strings).
3. **get the kth distinct string**: if the number of distinct strings is less than `k`, return an empty string; otherwise, return the kth distinct string.

### steps to implement
1. count the occurrences of each string using a dictionary.
2. create a list of distinct strings by checking the count.
3. return the kth element from this list (keeping in mind to adjust for zero-based indexing).

### python code example
here is a python implementation of the above approach:

### explanation of the code
1. **counting occurrences**: we initialize a dictionary `count` to keep track of how many times each string appears in the input array `arr`.
2. **finding distinct strings**: we iterate over the `arr` again and append strings that have a count of 1 to the `distinct_strings` list.
3. **checking length**: before accessing the kth element, we check if the length of `distinct_strings` is less than `k`. if it is, we return an empty string.
4. **returning the kth element**: finally, we return the kth distinct string using `distinct_strings[k - 1]`.

### complexity analysis
- **time complexity**: o(n), where n is the number of strings in the input array. counting takes o(n) and filtering also takes ...

#python array length
#python array types
#python array vs list
#python array to string
#python array indexing

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