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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in Python

Solution: Group Anagrams

Explore two approaches to group anagrams efficiently: sorting each string as a naive solution and using frequency mapping for an optimized method. Understand time and space trade-offs, and implement hash maps to collect and return groups of anagrams. This lesson helps you develop a strategy to handle anagram problems in coding interviews.

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Statement

Given a list of words or phrases, group the words that are anagrams of each other. An anagram is a word or phrase formed from another word by rearranging its letters.

Constraints:

Let strs be the list of strings given as input to find the anagrams.

  • 1≤1 \leq strs.length ≤103\leq 10^3
  • 0≤0 \leq strs[i].length ≤100\leq 100
  • strs[i] consists of lowercase English letters.

Note: The order in which the output is displayed doesn’t matter.

Solution

So far, you’ve probably brainstormed some approaches and have an idea of how to solve this problem. Let’s explore some of these approaches and figure out which one to follow based on considerations such as time complexity and any implementation constraints.

Naive approach

The naive approach is to sort all strings first, and then compare them to check whether they are identical. The idea is that if two strings are anagrams, ...