Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions
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Shortest Word Distance (easy)
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Problem Statement

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Problem Statement

Given an array of strings words and two different strings that already exist in the array word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.

Example 1:

Input: words = ["the", "quick", "brown", "fox", "jumps", "over", "the", "lazy", "dog"], word1 = "fox", word2 = "dog"
Output: 5
Explanation: The distance between "fox" and "dog" is 5 words.

Example 2:

Input: words = ["a", "c", "d", "b", "a"], word1 = "a", word2 = "b"
Output: 1
Explanation: The shortest distance between "a" and "b" is 1 word. Please note that "a" appeared twice.

Example 3:

Input: words = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"], word1 = "a", word2 = "e"
Output: 4
Explanation: The distance between "a" and "e" is 4 words.

Constraints:

  • 2 <= words.length <= 3 * 10<sup>4</sup>
  • 1 <= words[i].length <= 10
  • words[i] consists of lowercase English letters.
  • word1 and word2 are in words.
  • word1 != word2

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Python3
Python3
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Problem Statement

Try it yourself