Leetcode1048. Longest String Chain

You are given an array of words where each word consists of lowercase English letters.

wordA is a predecessor of wordB if and only if we can insert exactly one letter anywhere in wordA without changing the order of the other characters to make it equal to wordB.

• For example, "abc" is a predecessor of "abac", while "cba" is not a predecessor of "bcad".

A word chain is a sequence of words [word1, word2, ..., wordk] with k >= 1, where word1 is a predecessor of word2, word2 is a predecessor of word3, and so on. A single word is trivially a word chain with k == 1.

Return the length of the longest possible word chain with words chosen from the given list of words.

Example 1:

Input: words = ["a","b","ba","bca","bda","bdca"]
Output: 4
Explanation: One of the longest word chains is ["a","ba","bda","bdca"].

Example 2:

Input: words = ["xbc","pcxbcf","xb","cxbc","pcxbc"]
Output: 5
Explanation: All the words can be put in a word chain ["xb", "xbc", "cxbc", "pcxbc", "pcxbcf"].

class Solution:
    def longestStrChain(self, words: List[str]) -> int:
        #we need to record length of chain for each word in words, so we use dic here
        dp = {}
        #the least length of a chain is 1
        result = 1
        #why we sorted the words? 
        #since we need to find longest string chain
        #after sorting, latter one can not come before former one in chain
        for word in sorted(words, key=len):
            #the least length of a chain is 1
            dp[word] = 1
            #for each word, we try to find prev one in all possible chain
            for i in range(len(word)):
                prev = word[:i] + word[i+1:]
                #if prev one has already record in dp, we add 1 to it
                #and keep track the maximum for both dp and result
                if prev in dp:
                    dp[word] = max(dp[word], dp[prev]+1)
                    result = max(result, dp[word])
            
        return result