DIY: Alien Dictionary
Solve the interview question "Alien Dictionary" in this lesson.
We'll cover the following
Problem statement
In this coding exercise, you are given a list of words
written in an alien language, where the strings in the words
are sorted lexicographically by the rules of this language. Surprisingly, the aliens also use English lowercase letters, but possibly in a different order.
Given an array of words
written in the alien language, you have to return a string of unique letters sorted in lexicographically increasing order in the alien language.
If there are multiple solutions, you can return any one of them. If there is no solution, you can return an empty string: ""
.
Constraints
You can assume the following constraints:
1 <= words.length <= 100
1 <= words[i].length <= 20
- All characters in
words[i]
are English lowercase letters.
Input
The input will contain an array of strings words
. The following two are example inputs to the function:
// Sample Example - 1
words = ["xro", "xma", "per", "pert", "oxh", "olv"]
// Sample Example - 2
words = ["mdx", "mars", "avgd", "dkae"]
Output
// Sample Example - 1
"artevxhmplo"
// Sample Example - 2
""
Coding exercise
For this coding exercise, you have to implement the alienOrder(words)
function, where words
represents an array of words from an alien language dictionary. The function will return a string of unique letters sorted in lexicographically increasing order in that alien language.
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