Check If a Word Occurs As a Prefix of Any Word in a Sentence

Problem Description

Given a sentence that consists of some words separated by a single space, and a searchWord, check if searchWord is a prefix of any word in sentence. Return the index of the word in sentence (1-indexed) where searchWord is a prefix of this word. If searchWord is a prefix of more than one word, return the index of the first word (minimum index). If there is no such word return -1.

Key Insights

• A prefix is defined as any leading contiguous substring of a string.
• The solution requires checking each word in the sentence to see if the searchWord matches its prefix.
• The word's position must be returned in a 1-indexed format.
• Efficiently splitting the sentence into words is essential for iteration.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(n), where n is the number of words in the sentence.
Space Complexity: O(1), as we are using a fixed amount of extra space.

Solution

To solve this problem, we can utilize the following approach:

1. Split the sentence into words using a space delimiter.
2. Iterate through the list of words and check if the searchWord is a prefix of each word.
3. If a match is found, return the index of that word (adjusted for 1-indexing).
4. If no match is found after checking all words, return -1.

The primary data structure used here is a list to store the words from the sentence.

Code Solutions