【LeetCode】Word Ladder

Given two words (start and end), and a dictionary, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from start to end, such that:

Only one letter can be changed at a time
Each intermediate word must exist in the dictionary
For example,

Given:
start =”hit”
end =”cog”
dict =[“hot”,”dot”,”dog”,”lot”,”log”]

As one shortest transformation is”hit” -> “hot” -> “dot” -> “dog” -> “cog”,
return its length5.

Note:

Return 0 if there is no such transformation sequence.
All words have the same length.
All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.

题意：给定一个起始字符串和一个目标字符串，将起始字符串按照指定的变换规则转换为目标字符串，求最少要进行多少次转换。

转换规则：每次只能改变字符串中的一个字符，且每次转换后的字符串都要在给定的字符串集合中。

注意点：

• 如果无法完成转换则返回0
• 所有给出的字符串的长度都相等
• 所有的字符都为小写字母

class Solution{
public:
    int ladderLength(string start, string end, unordered_set<string> &dict){
        if (start == end)
            return 0;

        queue<pair<string, int>> q;
        map<string, bool> m;
        vector<string> v;

        q.push(make_pair(start, 1)); 
        while (!q.empty()){
            pair<string, int> cur = q.front();
            string word = cur.first;
            int lev = cur.second;

            if (word == end)
                break;
            q.pop();
            v.clear();
            getWord(v, word, m, dict);

            int len = v.size();
            for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i)
            {
                q.push(make_pair(v[i], lev + 1));
            }
        }

        if (q.empty())
            return 0;
        else
            return q.front().second;
    }

    void getWord(vector<string> &v, string start, map<string, bool> &m, const unordered_set<string> &dict)
    {
        int size = start.size();
        for (int i = 0; i < size; ++i){
            string tmp(start);
            for (int j = 0; j < 26; ++j){
                tmp[i] = j + 'a';
                if (tmp != start && dict.find(tmp) != dict.end() && m.find(tmp)==m.end())
                {
                    m.insert(make_pair(tmp, false));
                    v.push_back(tmp);
                }
            }
        }
    }
};