leetcode 126. Word Ladder II

Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find all shortest transformation sequence(s) from beginWord to endWord, such that:

1. Only one letter can be changed at a time
2. Each transformed word must exist in the word list. Note that beginWord is not a transformed word.

Note:

• Return an empty list if there is no such transformation sequence.
• All words have the same length.
• All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.
• You may assume no duplicates in the word list.
• You may assume beginWord and endWord are non-empty and are not the same.

Example 1:

Input:
beginWord = "hit",
endWord = "cog",
wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log","cog"]

Output:
[
  ["hit","hot","dot","dog","cog"],
  ["hit","hot","lot","log","cog"]
]

Example 2:

Input:
beginWord = "hit"
endWord = "cog"
wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]

Output: []

Explanation: The endWord "cog" is not in wordList, therefore no possible transformation.

题目给定beginWord,endWord以及一个wordList。返回beginWord到endWord的所有最短转换序列。

BFS(广度优先搜索)即可。如果只是求数量，应该会用C实现。但是要返回所有组合。C就太麻烦了。直接用Python水过。代码如下：

class Solution(object):
    def findLadders(self, beginWord, endWord, wordList):
        wordSet = set(wordList)#
        res = []
        layer = {} # 缓存所有搜索路径
        layer[beginWord] = [[beginWord]]

        while layer:
            newlayer = collections.defaultdict(list)
            for w in layer:
                if w == endWord: 
                    res.extend(k for k in layer[w])
                else:
                    for i in range(len(w)):
                        for c in 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz': #遍历所有可能的跳转word，并检测是否在剩余wordSet中
                            neww = w[:i]+c+w[i+1:]
                            if neww in wordSet:
                                newlayer[neww]+=[j+[neww] for j in layer[w]]

            wordSet -= set(newlayer.keys()) #移除已经使用过的word。
            layer = newlayer

        return res