Hard
,Array
,String
,DFS
,BFS
Two strings X
and Y
are similar if we can swap two letters (in different positions) of X
, so that it equals Y
. Also two strings X
and Y
are similar if they are equal.
For example, "tars"
and "rats"
are similar (swapping at positions 0 and 2), and "rats"
and "arts"
are similar, but "star"
is not similar to "tars"
, "rats"
, or "arts"
.
Together, these form two connected groups by similarity: {"tars", "rats", "arts"}
and {"star"}
. Notice that "tars"
and "arts"
are in the same group even though they are not similar. Formally, each group is such that a word is in the group if and only if it is similar to at least one other word in the group.
We are given a list strs
of strings where every string in strs
is an anagram of every other string in strs
. How many groups are there?
Example 1:
Example 2:
Constraints:
strs.length
<= 300strs[i].length
<= 300strs[i]
consists of lowercase letters only.strs
have the same length and are anagrams of each other.Yen-Chi ChenFri, Apr 28, 2023
To solve this problem, you can use the Disjoint Set Union (DSU) data structure. It's a data structure that allows you to efficiently group elements into disjoint sets and check which set an element belongs to. Here's a Python implementation to solve the problem:
This implementation defines a DSU class with the basic functionality for union and find operations. The are_similar
function checks if two strings are similar, and the count_groups
function counts the number of groups in the input list of strings using the DSU class.