127. Word Ladder

Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary’s word list, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord, such that:

Only one letter can be changed at a time
Each intermediate word must exist in the word list
For example,

Given:
beginWord = “hit”
endWord = “cog”
wordList = [“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.

Python:

class Solution(object):
def ladderLength(self, beginWord, endWord, wordList):
    """
    :type beginWord: str
    :type endWord: str
    :type wordList: Set[str]
    :rtype: int
    """
    queue = collections.deque([(beginWord, 1)])
    ls = string.ascii_lowercase
    wordList.add(endWord)
    while queue:
        word, dist = queue.popleft()
        if word == endWord:
            return dist
        for i in range(len(word)):
            for j in ls:
                if j != word[i]:
                    newWord = word[:i] + j + word[i+1:]
                    if newWord in wordList:
                        queue.append((newWord, dist+1))
                        wordList.remove(newWord)
    return 0