Grokking 75: Top Coding Interview Questions
Ask Author
Back to course home

0% completed

Vote For New Content
Determine if Two Strings Are Close (medium)
Table of Contents

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Problem Statement:

Two strings are considered similar if you can make one string look like the other using the following two operations:

  1. Swap any two characters.
    • For example, abde -> aedb (e and b swapped).
  2. Replace every occurrence of one character with another, and replace the other character with the first one.
    • For example, acabbb -> bcbaaa (all a's turn into b's, and all b's turn into a's)

Given two strings, word1 and word2, return true if they can be made similar, otherwise return false.

Examples

Example 1:

  • Input: word1 = "aacbbc", word2 = "bbcaca"
  • Expected Output: true
  • Justification: You can swap the 'a's and 'b's in word2 to make it "aacbcb", then swap the last two characters to match word1.

Example 2:

  • Input: word1 = "xxyyzz", word2 = "zzxxyy"
  • Expected Output: true
  • Justification: Swapping characters 'x' with 'z' and then 'z' with 'y' in word2 will make it "xxyyzz", which matches word1.

Example 3:

  • Input: word1 = "aabbcc", word2 = "aabbc"
  • Expected Output: false
  • Justification: The lengths of the two strings are different, so they can't be made to look the same.

Constraints:

  • 1 <= word1.length, word2.length <= 10<sup>5</sup>
  • word1 and word2 contain only lowercase English letters.

Try it yourself

Try solving this question here:

Python3
Python3
. . . .

.....

.....

.....

Like the course? Get enrolled and start learning!

Table of Contents

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible

Contents are not accessible