Question:
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.
//********** Hints ************
LZ认为leetcode里面有带word题干的题目都好难,此题也是其中之一,但是思路比较简单,用BFS即可:
一个Queue作为Breadth,一个Hashset作为判断visited
//*****************************
Solution:
public class Solution {
public int ladderLength(String start, String end, HashSet dict) {
Set<String> visited = new HashSet<String>();
Queue<String> breadth = new LinkedList<String>();
breadth.offer(start);
visited.add(start);
int step = 1;
int count = 1;
while(count > 0){
while(count > 0){
char[] cur = breadth.poll().toCharArray();
for(int i = 0; i < cur.length; i++){
char temp = cur[i];
for(char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++){
if(c == temp)
continue;
cur[i] = c;
String s = new String(cur);
if(s.equals(end))
return (step + 1);
if(!visited.contains(s) && dict.contains(s)){
breadth.offer(s);
visited.add(s);
}
}
cur[i] = temp;
}
count --;
}
step ++;
count = breadth.size();
}
return 0;
}
}