Alien Dictionary
Clarify the problem
- The problem asks us to determine the order of characters in an alien language given a list of words.
- The input will be an array of words, and the output should be a string representing the order of characters.
- We need to handle the case where the given input is invalid or does not have a valid order.
Analyze the problem
- We can think of this problem as a graph problem, where the characters are nodes, and the relationships between characters can be represented as directed edges.
- The order of characters can be found by performing a topological sort on the graph.
- We need to construct the graph by comparing adjacent words and finding the first differing characters.
- The constraints are not explicitly given, but we can assume that the words are non-empty and consist only of lowercase letters.
Design an algorithm
- Initialize an empty graph to store the relationships between characters.
- Construct the graph by comparing adjacent words and finding the first differing characters.
- Perform a topological sort on the graph to find the order of characters.
- Handle cases where the graph is cyclic or there is no valid order.
Explain your approach
- I will start by initializing an empty graph using a dictionary to represent the relationships between characters.
- I will then compare adjacent words and find the first differing characters to construct the graph.
- After constructing the graph, I will perform a topological sort to find the order of characters.
- If the graph is cyclic or there is no valid order, I will return an empty string.
Write clean and readable code
def alienOrder(words):
graph = {} # Dictionary to store relationships between characters
# Construct the graph
for i in range(len(words) - 1):
for j in range(min(len(words[i]), len(words[i+1]))):
if words[i][j] != words[i+1][j]:
if words[i][j] not in graph:
graph[words[i][j]] = set()
graph[words[i][j]].add(words[i+1][j])
break
# Perform topological sort
visited = {}
result = []
def dfs(node):
if node in visited:
if visited[node] == 0:
return False
else:
return True
visited[node] = 0
if node in graph:
for neighbor in graph[node]:
if not dfs(neighbor):
return False
visited[node] = 1
result.append(node)
return True
for node in graph:
if not dfs(node):
return ""
return ''.join(result[::-1]) # Reverse the result to get the correct order
Test your code
We can test the code with various test cases, including edge cases and corner cases.
For example:
print(alienOrder(["wrt", "wrf", "er", "ett", "rftt"]))
# Output: "wertf"
Optimize if necessary
- The given algorithm has a time complexity of O(n), where n is the total number of characters in the input words.
- The space complexity is also O(n) because we use a dictionary to store the graph relationships.
Handle error cases
- The code already handles cases where there is no valid order or the graph is cyclic. It returns an empty string in such cases.
Discuss complexity analysis
- The time complexity of the solution is O(n), where n is the total number of characters in the input words.
- The space complexity is also O(n) because we use a dictionary to store the graph relationships.
- The solution is efficient and handles the given problem within the specified constraints.