Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord, such that:
- Only one letter can be changed at a time
- Each intermediate word must exist in the word list
For example,
Given:
beginWord = "hit"
endWord = "cog"
wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]
As one shortest transformation is "hit" -> "hot" -> "dot" -> "dog" -> "cog"
,
return its length 5
.
网上对该问题的解决无一例外都是按照下面的思路:将当前单词每一个字符替换成a~z的任意一个字符,然后判断是否在词典中出现。此时的复杂度是O(26*word_length),当单词比较短时,这种方法的优势就体现出来了。
class Solution {
public:
int ladderLength(string beginWord, string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordList) {
if(beginWord.size() != endWord.size()) return 0;
if(beginWord.empty() || endWord.empty())return 0;
queue<string> path;
path.push(beginWord);
int level = 1;
int count = 1;
wordList.erase(beginWord);
while(wordList.size() > 0 && !path.empty())
{
string curword = path.front();
path.pop();count--;
for(int i = 0; i < curword.size(); i++)
{
string tmp = curword;
for(char j='a'; j<='z'; j++)
{
if(tmp[i]==j)continue;
tmp[i] = j;
if(tmp==endWord)return level+1;
if(wordList.find(tmp) != wordList.end()) path.push(tmp);
wordList.erase(tmp);
}
}
if(count==0)
{
count = path.size();
level++;
}
}
return 0;
}
};