Redistribute Characters to Make All Strings Equal

Problem Description

You are given an array of strings words. In one operation, pick two distinct indices i and j, where words[i] is a non-empty string, and move any character from words[i] to any position in words[j]. Return true if you can make every string in words equal using any number of operations, and false otherwise.

Key Insights

• Each character can be moved between strings, allowing for redistribution of characters.
• For all strings to be made equal, the total number of each character must be divisible by the number of strings.
• Count the frequency of each character across all strings and check if the total counts for each character can evenly distribute among the strings.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(n * m), where n is the number of strings and m is the average length of the strings.
Space Complexity: O(1), since the count of characters is limited to 26 lowercase English letters.

Solution

To solve this problem, we will:

1. Count the frequency of each character in all the strings.
2. Check if each character's total count can be evenly divided by the number of strings.
3. If all character counts are divisible, return true; otherwise, return false.

We will use a fixed-size array of 26 (for each letter) to maintain character counts.

Code Solutions