Solution: Verifying an Alien Dictionary

Explore how to verify if words are sorted lexicographically in an alien language by applying topological sort principles. Understand how to efficiently compare adjacent words using a character rank map derived from the alien alphabet order, managing edge cases such as prefixes. This lesson helps you implement a time-efficient solution while analyzing the trade-offs in complexity.

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Statement
Solution
- Naive approach
- Optimized approach using topological sort

Statement

In an alien language, the alphabet consists of the same lowercase English letters but arranged in a different order.

Given a list of words, words, written in this alien language, and a string order representing the order of the alien alphabet (as a permutation of lowercase letters), return TRUE if the words are sorted lexicographically according to order; otherwise, return FALSE.

Note: A word a is considered lexicographically smaller than word b if:
At the first position where the two words differ, the character in a comes before the character in b in the given order string.
If one word is a prefix of the other (and all compared characters are the same), then the shorter word is considered smaller.