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
.
Note:
- Return 0 if there is no such transformation sequence.
- All words have the same length.
- All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.
class Solution {
public:
/*algorithm: bfs
b:a e:c list:[a,b,c]
*/
int ladderLength(string beginWord, string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordList) {
unordered_map<string, int> dis; // store the distance from start to the current word
queue<string> Q; // FIFO for bfs purpose
dis[beginWord] = 1;
Q.push(beginWord);
while (!Q.empty()) {
string word = Q.front(); Q.pop();
if (word == endWord) break;
for (int i = 0; i < word.size(); i++) {
for (char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++) {
string next = word;
next[i] = c;
if ((wordList.count(next)|| next == endWord) && !dis.count(next)) {
dis[next] = dis[word] + 1;
Q.push(next);
}
}
}
}
if (!dis.count(endWord)) return 0;
return dis[endWord];
}
};