Solution: Verifying an Alien Dictionary
Explore a method to determine if words in an alien language are lexicographically sorted based on a custom alphabet order. Understand both naive and optimized solutions by comparing adjacent words, using topological sort concepts, and implementing a hash map for character ranking. This lesson guides you through the problem analysis, algorithm design, and complexity considerations to validate alien dictionary order efficiently.
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