Chapter 1 Arrays and Strings - 1.4

1.4 Write a method to decide if two strings are anagrams or not.

This "easy" problem really taught me a lesson. Firstly, I quickly came up with a somewhat smart solution:

import string
def are_anagrams(str1, str2):
    # To change a string, we have to convert it to a list first
    str1_list = [i for i in str1]
    str2_list = [i for i in str2]

    # Sort the two lists
    str1_list.sort()
    str2_list.sort()

    # Convert back to strings for comparison
    str1 = string.join(str1_list)
    str2 = string.join(str2_list)

    # Compare the sorted strings
    return str1 == str2

If we use quick sort, the solution above takes O(nlgn) running time. Andthen... I stopped!

So bad. I have seen so many problems and most of them have time complexity of O(nlgn) and cannot be improved further. So I naturally set O(nlgn) as my final goal. However, when I turned to the answer page, I found a better solution: if we sacrifice space, we can achieve O(n). The code below is my implementation based on the same thought as standard answer:

def are_anagrams2(str1, str2):
    if len(str1) != len(str2):
        return False
    
    flags = [0 for i in range(0, 256)]
    for i in range(0, len(str1)):
        index1 = ord(str1[i])
        index2 = ord(str2[i])
        # One occurrence of a letter in str1
        # makes the corresponding flag increase by one
        flags[index1]  = flags[index1] + 1

        # One occurrence of a letter in str2
        # makes the corresponding flag decrease by one
        flags[index2]  = flags[index2] - 1
    
    # If there exist a flag that is not 0, the two strings are not anagrams
    for i in range(0, 256):
        if flags[i] != 0:
            return False
    return True

I will keep it in mind: there is no perfect solution, and there always exists a better solution!