AdSense

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Valid words


You are given a string 's' and you are given a dictionary of english words. You goal is to write an algorithm that returns all words from the dictionary the can be formed by characters from that string 's'.
Example:
s = "ogeg"
following words can be formed from 's': go egg ego . . .
Further it is given that string 's' always consists of four lower case characters. Lets say that the dictionary is contained in a file and can be fitted in the memory. It is up to you which data structure you use to represent the dictionary.
How would you design an efficient algorithm? Follow up: What if the dictionary file can not be fitted in the memory?


This is a very interesting question. The problem statement is kind confusing.
Here is a question, why do we need to put the whole dictionary into the memory? The goal is to output all words that can be formed from s. From the example, we know that the order doesn't matter. So we only need to construct a hash map and store all four characters of s in it. And then read the dict from the stream and compare it with the characters in the hash map. I used another hash map. Since there are at most four characters for both strings, we don't need much extra space, do we?

If the question is, how to store the output words in an efficient way, I guess Trie would be a good one.


public static void validWords(String s, String dict) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException{
  BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(dict));
  String currLine;
  Map sMap = new HashMap();
  for(int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++){
   char c = s.charAt(i);
   if(!sMap.containsKey(c))
    sMap.put(c, 1);
   else
    sMap.put(c, sMap.get(c) + 1);
  }
  Map word = new HashMap();
  while((currLine = br.readLine()) != null){
   if(currLine.length() > 4)
    continue;
   word.clear();
   boolean valid = true;
   for(int i = 0; i < currLine.length(); i++){
    char c = currLine.charAt(i);
    if(!sMap.containsKey(c)){
     valid = false;
     break;
    }
    if(!word.containsKey(c))
     word.put(c, 1);
    else
     word.put(c, word.get(c) + 1);
    if(word.get(c) > sMap.get(c)){
     valid = false;
     break;
    }
   }
   if(valid)
    System.out.println(currLine);
  }
  br.close();
 }

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