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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns

Solution: Valid Word Abbreviation

Understand how to apply the two pointers method to check if an abbreviation correctly represents a given word. This lesson guides you through handling letter matching and skipping characters based on numbers in the abbreviation, enforcing rules against leading zeros and ensuring the abbreviation's validity.

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Statement

Given a string, word, and abbreviation, abbr, return TRUE if the abbreviation matches the given string. Otherwise, return FALSE. An abbreviation can replace any non-adjacent, non-empty substrings of the original word with their lengths. Replacement lengths must not contain leading zeros.

A certain word, "calendar", can be abbreviated as follows:

  • "cal3ar" ("cal + end [length = 3] + ar" skipping ...