Given a string, we can "shift" each of its letter to its successive letter, for example: "abc" -> "bcd"
. We can keep "shifting" which forms the sequence:
"abc" -> "bcd" -> ... -> "xyz"
Given a list of strings which contains only lowercase alphabets, group all strings that belong to the same shifting sequence.
For example, given: ["abc", "bcd", "acef", "xyz", "az", "ba", "a", "z"]
,
A solution is:
[ ["abc","bcd","xyz"], ["az","ba"], ["acef"], ["a","z"] ]
Solution:
public class Solution { public List<List<String>> groupStrings(String[] strings) { List<List<String>> resLists = new LinkedList<List<String>>(); HashMap<String,List<String>> patternMap = new HashMap<String,List<String>>(); for (String str : strings){ StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder().append(str); int delta = builder.charAt(0)-'a'; builder.setCharAt(0,'a'); for (int i=1;i<builder.length();i++){ char c = (char) ((builder.charAt(i) + 26 - delta)%26); builder.setCharAt(i,c); } String pattern = builder.toString(); if (!patternMap.containsKey(pattern)){ patternMap.put(pattern,new LinkedList<String>()); } patternMap.get(pattern).add(str); } for (List<String> strList : patternMap.values()){ resLists.add(strList); } return resLists; } }