Practice/LinkedIn/Leetcode 243. Shortest Word Distance

Leetcode 243. Shortest Word Distance

CodingOptional

Problem

You are given an array of strings and two different target words that both exist within the array. Your task is to find the minimum distance between any occurrence of the first word and any occurrence of the second word.

The distance between two words is defined as the absolute difference between their indices in the array.

Both target words are guaranteed to exist in the array and are guaranteed to be different from each other.

Requirements

1. Return the smallest possible distance between any occurrence of word1 and any occurrence of word2
2. The distance is calculated as the absolute difference between array indices
3. Both words are guaranteed to appear at least once in the input array
4. The two target words are guaranteed to be distinct

Constraints

• 2 ≤ words.length ≤ 10,000
• 1 ≤ words[i].length ≤ 100
• words[i] consists of lowercase English letters
• word1 and word2 are in the array and are different

Examples

Example 1:

Input: words = ["practice", "makes", "perfect", "coding", "makes"], word1 = "coding", word2 = "practice" Output: 3 Explanation: "coding" appears at index 3 and "practice" appears at index 0. The distance is |3 - 0| = 3.

Example 2:

Input: words = ["a", "c", "b", "a"], word1 = "a", word2 = "b" Output: 1 Explanation: "a" appears at indices 0 and 3. "b" appears at index 2. The minimum distance is min(|0 - 2|, |3 - 2|) = 1.

Example 3:

Input: words = ["hello", "world", "hello"], word1 = "hello", word2 = "world" Output: 1 Explanation: "hello" appears at indices 0 and 2. "world" appears at index 1. The minimum distances are |0 - 1| = 1 and |2 - 1| = 1.