Problem Description
You are given two string arrays, queries and dictionary. All words in each array comprise of lowercase English letters and have the same length. In one edit you can take a word from queries, and change any letter in it to any other letter. Find all words from queries that, after a maximum of two edits, equal some word from dictionary. Return a list of all words from queries, that match with some word from dictionary after a maximum of two edits. Return the words in the same order they appear in queries.
Key Insights
- Each word can be transformed into another word by changing its letters.
- We can change up to two letters in a word to match a word from the dictionary.
- The comparison needs to account for words of the same length.
- Efficiently checking the number of differing characters between words is key to solving the problem.
Space and Time Complexity
Time Complexity: O(m * n) where m is the number of queries and n is the number of dictionary words. Space Complexity: O(1) if we consider the space used for output only, otherwise O(m + n) for storing the input lists.
Solution
The solution involves iterating through each word in the queries list and comparing it with every word in the dictionary. For each pair, we count the number of differing characters. If the number of differences is 0, 1, or 2, we add the query word to the results.
We can use a simple character comparison to determine how many letters need to be changed for two words to match.