Given two words (start and end), and a dictionary, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from start to end, such that:
- Only one letter can be changed at a time
- 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.
题目大意:就是通过一个字典找到两个字符串的最短变换路径长度,start字符串和end字符串不要求属于字典,但是变换的中间字符串必须存在于字典并且只能出现一次(很关键,题目中没有明显表述,但是确实是如此),每次变换只能改变字符串中的一个单词,这里所有的讨论包括字典都只考虑小写字母。
是广度搜索(BFS)的变型,可以进行一层的搜索,distance加1,直到找到end为止。代码如下:
public class Solution {
public int ladderLength(String start, String end, HashSet<String> dict) {
HashSet<String> set=new HashSet<String>();
Queue<String> queue=new LinkedList<String>();
queue.offer(start);
set.add(start);
int distance=1;
while(!queue.isEmpty())
{
int count=queue.size();
while(count>0)
{
char[] tempstr=queue.poll().toCharArray();
for(int i=0;i<tempstr.length;i++)
{
char tempchar=tempstr[i];
for(char c='a';c<='z';c++)
{
if(c==tempchar)
continue;
tempstr[i]=c;
String str=new String(tempstr);
if(str.equals(end))
return distance+1;
if(dict.contains(str)&&!set.contains(str))
{
queue.offer(str);
set.add(str);
}
}
tempstr[i]=tempchar;
}
count--;
}
distance++;
}
return 0;
}
}