Reference: LeetCode
Difficulty: Medium

Problem

Given an array of strings, group anagrams together.

Note:

  • All inputs will be in lowercase.
  • The order of your output does not matter.

Example:

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Input: ["eat", "tea", "tan", "ate", "nat", "bat"],
Output:
[
["ate","eat","tea"],
["nat","tan"],
["bat"]
]

Analysis

HashMap + Sorting

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// output order does not matter
// inputs are in lowercase
public List<List<String>> groupAnagrams(String[] strs) {
if (strs == null || strs.length == 0) {
return new ArrayList<>();
}
Map<String, List<String>> map = new HashMap<>();
for (String s : strs) {
String key = sortString(s);
List<String> list = map.getOrDefault(key, new ArrayList<>());
list.add(s);
map.put(key, list);
}
// List<List<String>> result = new ArrayList<>();
// for (String key : map.keySet()) {
// result.add(map.get(key));
// }
// return result;
return new ArrayList<>(map.values());
}

private String sortString(String str) {
char[] arr = str.toCharArray();
Arrays.sort(arr);
return String.valueOf(arr);
}

Time: $O(NK\log{K})$ where $K$ is the maximum length of a string.
Space: $O(NK)$

Categorize by Count

Count a string’s characters and generate a key like #1#2#3#4....

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public List<List<String>> groupAnagrams(String[] strs) {
if (strs.length == 0) return new ArrayList();
Map<String, List> ans = new HashMap<String, List>();
int[] count = new int[26];
for (String s : strs) {
Arrays.fill(count, 0);
for (char c : s.toCharArray()) count[c - 'a']++;

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("");
for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) {
sb.append('#');
sb.append(count[i]);
}
String key = sb.toString();
if (!ans.containsKey(key)) ans.put(key, new ArrayList());
ans.get(key).add(s);
}
return new ArrayList(ans.values());
}

Time: $O(NK)$
Space: $O(NK)$