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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in Python

Solution: Check If a Word is a Prefix of Any Word in a Sentence

Explore how to determine if a given search word is a prefix of any word in a sentence by using a trie data structure. This lesson shows how splitting the sentence and inserting words into a trie enables fast prefix checks and returns the earliest matching word index with efficient time and space complexity.

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Statement

You are given a sentence containing words separated by single spaces and a searchWord. Your task is to determine whether searchWord is a prefix of any word in the sentence.

Return the 1-based index of the first word in which searchWord appears as a prefix.

  • If searchWord is a prefix of multiple words, return the index of the earliest such word.

  • If no word starts with searchWord, return −1-1.

A prefix of a string is any contiguous substring that begins at the first character.

Constraints:

  • 1<=1 <= sentence.length <=100<= 100

  • 1 ...