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Program to find minimum distance of two given words in a text in Python
Suppose we have three strings text, w1, and w2. The text is a sentence with different words. We have to find the smallest distance between any two occurrences of w1 and w2 in the text, the distance is measured in number of words in between them. If either w1 or w2 is not present in text, return -1.
So, if the input is like text = "joy happy power happy joy joy power happy limit" w1 = "power" w2 = "limit", then the output will be 1, as there is only one word "happy" in between the power and limit.
To solve this, we will follow these steps −
index1 := null, index2 := null
distance := 999999
for each index idx and word w in text, do
if w is same as w1, then
if index2 is not null, then
distance := minimum of distance and (|idx - index2| - 1)
index1 := idx
if w is same as w2, then
if index1 is not null, then
distance := minimum of distance and (|idx - index1| - 1)
index2 := idx
if index1 is not null and index2 is not null, then
return distance
return -1
Example
Let us see the following implementation to get better understanding
def solve(text, w1, w2):
index1 = None
index2 = None
distance = 2000000
for idx, word in enumerate(text.split(" ")):
if word == w1:
if index2 is not None:
distance = min(distance, abs(idx - index2) - 1)
index1 = idx
if word == w2:
if index1 is not None:
distance = min(distance, abs(idx - index1) - 1)
index2 = idx
if index1 is not None and index2 is not None:
return distance
return -1
text = "joy happy power happy joy joy power happy limit"
w1 = "power"
w2 = "limit"
print(solve(text, w1, w2))Input
"joy happy power happy joy joy power happy limit", "power", "limit"
Output
1
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