Solution: Design Add and Search Words Data Structure
Explore how to build a WordDictionary data structure using a trie to support adding words and searching with wildcard characters. Understand the trie node structure, and learn search algorithms that handle exact and partial matches. This lesson helps you optimize search operations and evaluate time and space complexities for practical coding interview solutions.
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Statement
Design a data structure called WordDictionary that supports the following functionalities:
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Constructor: This function will initialize the object.
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Add Word(word): This function will store the provided word in the data structure.
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Search Word(word): This function will return TRUE if any string in the WordDictionary object matches the query word. Otherwise, it will return FALSE. If the query word contains dots,
., each dot is free to match any letter of the alphabet.For example, the dot in the string “.ad” can have possible search results like “aad”, “bad”, “cad”, and so on.
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Get Words(): This function will return all the words in the WordDictionary class.
Constraints:
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word.length -
Words passed to Add Word() consist of lowercase English letters.
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Words passed to Search Word() consist of
.or lowercase English letters. -
There will be, at most, three dots in a word passed to Search Word().
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At most, calls will be made to Add Word() , Get Words() and Search Word(). ... ...