[Leetcode]Word Ladder

[题目]

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

1. Only one letter can be changed at a time
2. 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 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.

[思路]

思路是BFS。。。。

一个词语变动一个字母，有很多种情况：26 * word.length() ，都要遍历到，而且dictionary里面可能有不止一个候选，所以每一层，要用一个queue来存储。

string.subString(int start, int end):只能取到start - > end -1

start the offset of the first character

end the offset one past the last character

s.substring(0,0)也是成立的，合法的。

[代码]

并没有通过测试，理由是：out of time limited..

public int ladderLength(String start, String end, Set<String> dict) {
    LinkedList<String> queue = new LinkedList<String>();
    queue.add(start);
    dict.add(end);
    int step = 0;

 while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
        LinkedList<String> level = new LinkedList<String>();
        step++;
        while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
            String q = queue.pollFirst();
            if (q.equals(end))
                return step;
            for (int i = 0; i < start.length(); i++) {
                for (char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++) {
                    String s = q.substring(0, i) + c + q.substring(i + 1, start.length());
                    if (dict.contains(s)) {
                        level.add(s);
                        dict.remove(s);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        queue = level;
    }
    return 0;
}

唯一的区别就是将string q没有直接使用substring, 而是换成了charArray()，然后替换r里面第i个，在把新组成的string s 放在dict里面判断。

public int ladderLength(String start, String end, Set<String> dict) {
    LinkedList<String> queue = new LinkedList<String>();
    queue.add(start);
    dict.add(end);
    int step = 0;

    while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
        LinkedList<String> level = new LinkedList<String>();
        step++;
        while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
            String q = queue.poll();
            if(q.equals(end))
                return step;

            char[] t = q.toCharArray();
            for(int i = 0; i < start.length(); i++){
                for(char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++){
                    char temp = t[i];
                    t[i] = c;
                    String s = String.copyValueOf(t);
                    t[i] = temp;
                    if(dict.contains(s)){
                        level.add(s);
                        dict.remove(s);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        queue = level;
    }

    return 0;
}