100000 00000 00000 00000 00000 100000 00000 00000 00000 00000 010000 00000 00000 00000 00000 aab and baa 100000 00000 00000 00000 00000 010000 00000 00000 000

100000 00000 00000 00000 00000 100000 00000 00000 00000 00000 010000 00000 00000 00000 00000 aab and baa 100000 00000 00000 00000 00000 010000 00000 00000 00000 00000 000000 00000 00000 00000 00000 ab You aren't "counting" the number of characters. You're making an encoding that includes that information, without the aggregation. The aggregation is irrelevant as is the order of duplicate characters.