Longest Word in Dictionary

Given a list of strings words representing an English Dictionary, find the longest word in words that can be built one character at a time by other words in words. If there is more than one possible answer, return the longest word with the smallest lexicographical order.

If there is no answer, return the empty string.

Example 1:

Input: 
words = ["w","wo","wor","worl", "world"]
Output: "world"
Explanation: 
The word "world" can be built one character at a time by "w", "wo", "wor", and "worl".

 

Example 2:

Input: 
words = ["a", "banana", "app", "appl", "ap", "apply", "apple"]
Output: "apple"
Explanation: 
Both "apply" and "apple" can be built from other words in the dictionary. However, "apple" is lexicographically smaller than "apply".

 

Note:

• All the strings in the input will only contain lowercase letters.
• The length of words will be in the range [1, 1000].
• The length of words[i] will be in the range [1, 30].

 

这道题给了我们一个字符串数组，求从单个字符开始拼，最长能组成的单词，且中间生成的字符串也要在字典中存在，而且当组成的单词长度相等时，返回字母顺序小的那个。

为了快速的查找某个单词是否在字典中存在，把所有单词放到哈希集合中，在查找的时候，用BFS的做法，使用一个queue来辅助，先把所有长度为1的单词找出排入queue中，当作种子选手，然后进行循环，每次从队首取一个元素出来，如果其长度大于维护的最大值mxLen，则更新mxLen和结果res，如果正好相等，也要更新结果res，取字母顺序小的那个。

然后增加长度，做法就是遍历26个字母，将每个字母都加到单词后面，然后看是否在字典中存在，存在的话，就加入queue中等待下一次遍历，完了以后要恢复状态。

class Solution {
public:
    string longestWord(vector<string>& words) {
        string res = "";
        int mxLen = 0;
        unordered_set<string> s(words.begin(), words.end());
        queue<string> q;
        for (string word : words) {
            if (word.size() == 1) q.push(word);
        }
        while (!q.empty()) {
            string t = q.front(); q.pop();
            if (t.size() > mxLen) {
                mxLen = t.size();
                res = t;
            } else if (t.size() == mxLen) {
                res = min(res, t);
            }
            for (char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; ++c) {
                t.push_back(c);
                if (s.count(t)) q.push(t);
                t.pop_back();
            }
        }
        return res;
    }
};