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Program to find number of steps required to change one word to another in Python
Suppose we have a list of words called dictionary and we have another two strings start and end. We want to reach from start to end by changing one character at a time and each resulting word should also be in the dictionary. Words are case-sensitive. So we have to find the minimum number of steps it would take to reach at the end. If it is not possible then return -1.
So, if the input is like dictionary = ["may", "ray", "rat"] start = "rat" end = "may", then the output will be 3, as we can select this path: ["rat", "ray", "may"].
To solve this, we will follow these steps −
dictionary := a new set with all unique elements present in q = a double ended queue with a pair (start, 1) while q is not empty, do (word, distance) := left element of q, and delete the left element if word is same as end, then return distance for i in range 0 to size of word - 1, do for each character c in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", do next_word := word[from index 0 to i - 1] concatenate c concatenate word[from index (i + 1) to end] if next_word is in dictionary, then delete next_word from dictionary insert (next_word, distance + 1) at the end of q return -1
Example (Python)
Let us see the following implementation to get better understanding −
from collections import deque class Solution: def solve(self, dictionary, start, end): dictionary = set(dictionary) q = deque([(start, 1)]) while q: word, distance = q.popleft() if word == end: return distance for i in range(len(word)): for c in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz": next_word = word[:i] + c + word[i + 1 :] if next_word in dictionary: dictionary.remove(next_word) q.append((next_word, distance + 1)) return -1 ob = Solution() dictionary = ["may", "ray", "rat"] start = "rat" end = "may" print(ob.solve(dictionary, start, end))
Input
["may", "ray", "rat"], "rat", "may"
Output
3
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