DIY: Word Ladder II
Solve the interview question "Word Ladder II" in this lesson.
We'll cover the following
Problem statement
In this scenario, you are given a list of words, a startingWord
, and an endingWord
. The problem requires you to find all shortest transformation sequences’ from startingWord
to endingWord
. There are a few conditions for this problem:
-
All the words should be the same length.
-
There should be no duplicates in the given list.
-
startingWord
andendingWord
should be non-empty. -
startingWord
andendingWord
should not be the same. -
A transition can only occur if two words differ by one character/alphabet.
-
It should return an empty list if there is no such transformation sequence.
-
All the words should contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.
Input
The following is an example input:
wordList = {"hot","dot","dog","lot","log","cog"}
start = "hit"
target = "cog"
Output
The following is an example output:
{
{"hit","hot","dot","dog","cog"},
{"hit","hot","lot","log","cog"}
}
It can be seen that hit
can be converted to cog
by following the above two sequences.
Coding exercise
For this coding exercise, you need to implement the wordLadder2(startingWord, endingWord, wordList)
function. The function will return the shortest transformation sequences from startingWord
to endingWord
.
Level up your interview prep. Join Educative to access 70+ hands-on prep courses.