Solution: Verifying an Alien Dictionary
Explore how to apply the topological sort pattern to verify if a list of words is sorted according to a custom alien alphabet order. Understand comparing adjacent words lexicographically, handling character order with a hash map, and managing edge cases related to word length. This lesson helps you solve the alien dictionary problem efficiently by avoiding redundant comparisons and learning to implement the solution with clear time and space complexity understanding.
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
ais considered lexicographically smaller than wordbif:
At the first position where the two words differ, the character in
acomes before the character inbin the givenorderstring.If one word is a prefix of the other (and all compared characters are the same), then the shorter word is considered smaller.
Constraints:
-
words.length