243. Shortest Word Distance
https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-word-distance/
https://www.lintcode.com/problem/shortest-word-distance/description
https://github.com/openset/leetcode/tree/master/problems/shortest-word-distance
Given a list of words and two words word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.
Example:
Assume that words = ["practice", "makes", "perfect", "coding", "makes"].
Input: word1 =“coding”, word2 =“practice”Output: 3
Input: word1 ="makes", word2 ="coding"Output: 1
Note:
You may assume that word1 does not equal to word2, and word1 and word2 are both in the list.
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Intuition
We just need access to closest indexes for word1, word2
We can get that as soon as we find first matches of word1 and word2
Traverse left to right, and save index1, index2 if we find a match
if (index1 != -1 && index2 != -1) {
ans = min(ans, abs(index1 - index2))
}
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Time - O(N)
Space - O(1)
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