LeetCode 1002. Find Common Characters

Given a string array words, return an array of all characters that show up in all strings within the words (including duplicates). You may return the answer in any order.

Example 1:

Input: words = ["bella","label","roller"]
Output: ["e","l","l"]

Example 2:

Input: words = ["cool","lock","cook"]
Output: ["c","o"]

Constraints:

• 1 <= words.length <= 100
• 1 <= words[i].length <= 100
• words[i] consists of lowercase English letters.

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题目要求找数组里所有string的共同字符（含重复的）。刚开始想的是把第一个当成基准，把第一个的每个字符放到后面的string里找，如果没有就把它remove。看了解答以后才发现有更好的方法，维护一个dictionary，直接求每个字母在一个word中出现的次数的最小值。

class Solution {
    public List<String> commonChars(String[] words) {
        List<String> result = new ArrayList<>();
        
        int[] all = new int[26];
        for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) {
            all[i] = 10000;
        }
        int[] count = new int[26];
        
        for (String word : words) {
            for (char c : word.toCharArray()) {
                count[c - 'a']++;
            }
            for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) {
                all[i] = Math.min(count[i], all[i]);
                count[i] = 0;  // reset count
            }
        }

        for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) {
            for (int j = 0; j < all[i]; j++) {
                result.add(String.valueOf((char)('a' + i)));
            }
        }
        
        return result;
    }
}