【Leetcode】79. Word Search[Medium]

Description

Given a 2D board and a word, find if the word exists in the grid.

The word can be constructed from letters of sequentially adjacent cell, where “adjacent” cells are those horizontally or vertically neighboring. The same letter cell may not be used more than once.

Example

board =
[
  ['A','B','C','E'],
  ['S','F','C','S'],
  ['A','D','E','E']
]

Given word = "ABCCED", return true.
Given word = "SEE", return true.
Given word = "ABCB", return false.

Solving

• We should find the character matching the first letter in this word at first.
• Then searching the character around it util match or mismatch (backtracking).
• There is a little trick in matching: changing current character so we can continue the next matching and don’t need to worry about matching the character already in use.

class Solution {
    public boolean exist(char[][] board, String word) {
        if (board.length != 0 && board[0].length != 0)
            for (int i = 0; i < board.length; i ++)
                for (int j = 0; j < board[i].length; j ++)
                    if (backtracking(board, word, i, j, 0))
                        return true;
        return false;
    }
    
    private boolean backtracking(char[][] board, String word, 
                                 int row, int col, int pos) {
        if (pos == word.length())
            return true;
        if (row < 0 || row >= board.length 
            || col < 0 || col >= board[row].length 
            || board[row][col] != word.charAt(pos))
            return false;
        board[row][col] -= 'A'; // Avoiding going back
        boolean res = backtracking(board, word, row + 1, col, pos + 1)
                    || backtracking(board, word, row - 1, col, pos + 1)
                    || backtracking(board, word, row, col + 1, pos + 1)
                    || backtracking(board, word, row, col - 1, pos + 1);
        board[row][col] += 'A'; // Restore this character
        return res;
    }
}