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Goat Latin

Difficulty: Easy

Problem Description

You are given a string sentence that consists of words separated by spaces. Each word consists of lowercase and uppercase letters only. We would like to convert the sentence to "Goat Latin" (a made-up language similar to Pig Latin). The rules of Goat Latin are as follows:

  • If a word begins with a vowel ('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', or 'u'), append "ma" to the end of the word.
  • If a word begins with a consonant (i.e., not a vowel), remove the first letter and append it to the end, then add "ma".
  • Add one letter 'a' to the end of each word per its word index in the sentence, starting with 1.

Return the final sentence representing the conversion from sentence to Goat Latin.

Key Insights

  • Identify whether the first letter of each word is a vowel or consonant.
  • Modify the word according to the rules specified based on its first letter.
  • Keep track of the index of each word to appropriately add the 'a' characters.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(n), where n is the number of characters in the input sentence. Space Complexity: O(n), for storing the modified words before joining them into the final sentence.

Solution

To solve the problem, we will:

  1. Split the input string into individual words.
  2. Loop through each word and check if it starts with a vowel or consonant.
  3. Transform the word according to the Goat Latin rules.
  4. Append the appropriate number of 'a' characters based on the word's position in the sentence.
  5. Join the transformed words back together into a single string and return it.

The primary data structure used is a list to hold the transformed words before joining them into a final string.

Code Solutions

def toGoatLatin(sentence: str) -> str:
    vowels = set('aeiouAEIOU')  # Set of vowels
    words = sentence.split()  # Split the sentence into words
    goat_latin_words = []  # List to hold Goat Latin words

    for index, word in enumerate(words):
        if word[0] in vowels:  # Check if the first letter is a vowel
            goat_word = word + "ma"  # Append "ma"
        else:
            goat_word = word[1:] + word[0] + "ma"  # Move first letter and append "ma"
        
        goat_word += 'a' * (index + 1)  # Add 'a's based on index
        goat_latin_words.append(goat_word)  # Add transformed word to list

    return ' '.join(goat_latin_words)  # Join and return the final sentence
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