Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions
Ask Author
Back to course home

0% completed

Vote For New Content
Shortest Word Distance (easy)
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

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

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