Leetcode 890. Find and Replace Pattern

Gary Chiang
1 min readMay 21, 2021

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[medium]

Given a list of strings words and a string pattern, return a list of words[i] that match pattern. You may return the answer in any order.

A word matches the pattern if there exists a permutation of letters p so that after replacing every letter x in the pattern with p(x), we get the desired word.

Recall that a permutation of letters is a bijection from letters to letters: every letter maps to another letter, and no two letters map to the same letter.

Example 1:

Input: words = ["abc","deq","mee","aqq","dkd","ccc"], pattern = "abb"
Output: ["mee","aqq"]
Explanation: "mee" matches the pattern because there is a permutation {a -> m, b -> e, ...}.
"ccc" does not match the pattern because {a -> c, b -> c, ...} is not a permutation, since a and b map to the same letter.

Example 2:

Input: words = ["a","b","c"], pattern = "a"
Output: ["a","b","c"]

Constraints:

  • 1 <= pattern.length <= 20
  • 1 <= words.length <= 50
  • words[i].length == pattern.length
  • pattern and words[i] are lowercase English letters.

[Think]

  1. change the pattern to number, if we already see the character, we will use the same integer to put into the bucket
  2. trick part is using map.size() to memorize the current index

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Gary Chiang
Gary Chiang

Written by Gary Chiang

CS new grad, 6 years experience related to supply chain management. Located in Bay area

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