Question
Given a list of words and two words word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.
Example: Assume that words = [“practice”, “makes”, “perfect”, “coding”, “makes”].
Input: word1 = “coding”, word2 = “practice”
Output: 3
Input: word1 = "makes", word2 = "coding"
Output: 1
Solution
TODO
Code
Here is a sample solution.
class Solution {
public int shortestDistance(String[] words, String word1, String word2) {
int idx = -1;
String word = null;
int min = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
for(int i=0; i<words.length; i++) {
if(words[i].equals(word2) || words[i].equals(word1)) {
if(word != null && !word.equals(words[i])) {
min = Math.min(min, i-idx);
}
idx = i;
word = words[i];
}
}
return min;
}
}
Performance
O(n)