HackerRank: Sherlocks and Anagram (III)

March 27, 2016

Problem statement:

https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/sherlock-and-anagrams

Difficulty: Moderate

This problem solving gets hot. Julia found something she struggled a lot. When Julia spent more than 2 hours on a problem in the Saturday evening, she knew that she is in trouble. She needs to be trained, and she needs a mentor.

Solution to study:

https://gist.github.com/jianminchen/68453786a6ea03774a16

Julia, you should warm up with C# Dictionary<string, int>, and also StringBuilder class, AppendFormat function.

Let us review how to design anagram key more efficient, more understandable way:

/*
Think about how smart and easy it is to design this key for anagram string.

Precondition:
if two strings are anagram, the key should be same.
if two strings are not anagram, the key should be different.

Test case:
ab, the key is {0}-1{1}-1
ba, the key is {0}-1{1}-1,
but
bc, the key is {0}-0{1}-1{2}-1

compare to the design of anagram key using integer, this one is much easy to understand and follow.

http://juliachencoding.blogspot.ca/2016/03/hackerrank-string-sherlock-and-anagrams.html
*/

static string GiveKey(int[] arr){
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        for(int i = 0 ; i < 26 ; i++){
            sb.AppendFormat("{0}-",arr[i]);
        }
        return sb.ToString();
    }