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Valid Anagram

Certification: Basic Level Accuracy: 0% Submissions: 0 Points: 5

Write a C program to determine if two strings are anagrams of each other. An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, "listen" and "silent" are anagrams.

Example 1
    
  
  • Input: s = "listen", t = "silent"
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  • Output: true
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  • Explanation: 
    Step 1: We need to check if "listen" and "silent" are anagrams.

    Step 2: Both strings have the same length (6 characters).

    Step 3: We count the occurrences of each character in both strings.

    Step 4: "listen" has: l(1), i(1), s(1), t(1), e(1), n(1).

    Step 5: "silent" has: s(1), i(1), l(1), e(1), n(1), t(1).

    Step 6: The character counts are identical, so they are anagrams.
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Example 2
    
  
  • Input: s = "hello", t = "world"
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  • Output: false
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  • Explanation:

    Step 1: We need to check if "hello" and "world" are anagrams.

    Step 2: Both strings have the same length (5 characters).

    Step 3: We count the occurrences of each character in both strings.

    Step 4: "hello" has: h(1), e(1), l(2), o(1).

    Step 5: "world" has: w(1), o(1), r(1), l(1), d(1).

    Step 6: The character counts are different, so they are not anagrams.
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Constraints
    
  
  • The input strings contain only lowercase English letters (a-z)
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  • 1 <= s.length, t.length <= 5 * 10^4
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  • The solution should have a time complexity of O(n) where n is the length of the strings
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  • The solution should have a space complexity of O(1) as there is a fixed number of possible characters (26)
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Hint
Solution

Solution Hints

    
  
  • First, check if the lengths of both strings are equal. If not, they cannot be anagrams.
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  • Create a frequency counter for each character in the first string.
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  • Decrement the frequency counter for each character in the second string.
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  • If any character's frequency is not zero at the end, the strings are not anagrams.
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  • Use an array of size 26 to store the frequency of each character.
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  • Alternatively, use a hash table if the character set is large or unknown.
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Steps to solve by this approach:

 Step 1: Check if the lengths of both strings are equal (if not, return false immediately)

 Step 2: Create a frequency array of size 26 to count occurrences of each lowercase letter

 Step 3: Iterate through the first string and increment the frequency for each character

 Step 4: Iterate through the second string and decrement the frequency for each character

 Step 5: While decrementing, if any frequency becomes negative, immediately return false

 Step 6: Check if all frequencies are zero after processing both strings

 Step 7: If all frequencies are zero, the strings are anagrams, so return true

Submitted Code :