new_contents: #
  # Another solution involves allocating an array of indices and sorting it.
  # This will provide us with a way to traverse characters in the string in
  # a sorted order while preserving the original string.
  #
  # We then use itertools.groupby to group up the duplicates. Each group is
  # then traversed, if the length of a group is equal to one, the character
  # is unique, however it is not necessarily the first unique character.
  #
  # In order to find the first unique character, we use the min() function
  # to save the smaller index of a unique character. The important caveat
  # is that we initialize the "result" variable to the length of the indices
  # array (which is equal to the length of the string). This will enable the
  # min function to evaluate the smallest index correctly.
  #
  # If no unique characters were found, the "result" variable will remain
  # equal to the length of the indices array. We check for that, if so,
  # we return -1 according to the spec. If not, we return the "result"
  # variable.
  #
  
  class Solution(object):
      def firstUniqChar(self, s):
          """
          :type s: str
          :rtype: int
          """
          import itertools
      
          indices = sorted(range(len(s)), key=lambda x: s[x])
          result  = len(indices)
      
          for char, group in itertools.groupby(indices, key=lambda x: s[x]):
              group = tuple(group)
      
              if len(group) == 1:
                  result = min(result, group[0])
      
          if result == len(indices):
              return -1
      
          return result
  
subject: Create solution2.py