Leetcode - Episode 12 - Starting Early (3 x E)

Today we’re doing ‘Saturday Morning Coffee’ solutions — instead of ‘10pm Work Night’ solutions!

Continuing with the streak of string-based problems, all of the code here is ‘optimal’ — i.e., ~97th percentile or higher in the rankings.

953. Verifying an Alien Dictionary

Problem: Given the order of an alien alphabet, are these given alien words ordered lexiographically?

I started with a naive solution to this, which was to iterate order into a Dictionary for fast character look-up. I then compared the given list against a sorted() version of itself. I.e., return words == sorted(words, key=some lambda). I wasn’t happy with the runtime and I was wasting space — sorted creates an addtional list in memory. Also, the function being passed to the lambda converted every word to a numerical list — more created space, more complexity.

I then tested using a list of [None] * 26 to use as a look-up ‘Dictionary’ by converting the ASCII letters to their numerical values but it was actually slower than using a normal Dictionary which was surprising. So, the Dictionary had to stay.

My improvement was to use a compare function, letter by letter, so that no extra space was created. In some cases only the first letter of each word needed to be checked — instead of converting each whole word.

class Solution(object):
    def isAlienSorted(self, words, order):
        """
        :type words: List[str]
        :type order: str
        :rtype: bool
        """
        
        # fast char-value checking
        vals = dict()
        for idx, val in enumerate(order):
            vals[val] = idx
        
        
        for i in range(0, len(words)-1):
            w1, w2 = words[i], words[i+1]
            flag = 0
            
            for j in range(min(len(w1), len(w2))):
                if vals[w1[j]] < vals[w2[j]]:
                    # w1 is winner
                    flag = 1
                    break
                elif vals[w1[j]] > vals[w2[j]]:
                    # w2 is winner
                    return False

            # w1 and w2 have equal comparable chars
            if flag != 1:
                if len(w1) > len(w2):
                    return False
        
        return True

This is one of my fastest and cleanest solutions yet.

Runtime: 32 ms, faster than 100.00% of Python online submissions for Verifying an Alien Dictionary.

Runtime complexity: O(n).

Spacetime complexity: Assuming an order of 26: O(1).

917. Reverse Only Letters

Problem: Reverse the letters in string S leaving all other characters in place.

I used a simple ‘two pointer’ solution to this, similar to a version that I used for 345. Reverse Vowels of a String.

from string import ascii_letters
class Solution(object):
    def reverseOnlyLetters(self, S):
        """
        :type S: str
        :rtype: str
        """
        S = list(S)
        letters = set(ascii_letters)
        start = 0
        end = len(S)-1
        while not start > end:
            if S[start] not in letters:
                start += 1
                continue
            if S[end] not in letters:
                end -= 1
                continue
            S[start], S[end] = S[end], S[start]
            start += 1
            end -= 1
        return ''.join(S)

After researching, and checking the runtime percentile (~97th), I believe this to be the most optimal Python solution to this problem.

Runtime complexity: O(n).

Space complexity: O(1).

844. Backspace String Compare

Problem: Given string S and T, are they equal when written in a text editor when # is backspace?

One of my early solutions was creating two lists, e.g., [None] * len(S), but I realised that this wasn’t optimal and may create more space than required.

I reached for deque — Python’s implementation of a Double Ended Queue. With backspace equalling a pop() the rest was pretty straight forward.

from collections import deque
class Solution(object):
    def backspaceCompare(self, S, T):
        """
        :type S: str
        :type T: str
        :rtype: bool
        """
        s = deque()
        for i in S:
            if i == '#':
                if len(s) > 0:
                    s.pop()
                else:
                    continue
            else:
                s.append(i)
            
        t = deque()
        for i in T:
            if i == '#':
                if len(t) > 0:
                    t.pop()
                else:
                    continue
            else:
                t.append(i)

        return s == t

I saw a faster solution to this problem that doesn’t use any data structures. Instead it uses while loops and a lot of checking. It’s about twice as many lines of code as mine and, while impressive, is incredibly hard to parse!

Runtime complexity: O(n).

Spacetime complexity: O(n).