Problem Statement
Word Puzzle Challenge
You're designing a word puzzle game for a popular mobile app. One of the game's features involves anagrams, where players rearrange letters to form new words.
For the game's validation system, you need to create a function that determines if two strings are anagrams of each other. An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once.
Your task is to write a function that takes two strings as input and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, and false otherwise. The function should ignore case sensitivity and consider only alphanumeric characters.
Examples
Example 1:
Input: s = "listen", t = "silent"
Output: true
Explanation: "listen" and "silent" contain the same letters, just in a different order.
Example 2:
Input: s = "Astronomer", t = "Moon starer"
Output: true
Explanation: When we ignore spaces and case, both strings contain the same characters with the same frequencies.
Example 3:
Input: s = "hello", t = "world"
Output: false
Explanation: These strings contain different characters and cannot be anagrams of each other.
Constraints
- The input strings consist of alphanumeric characters and spaces.
- The function should be case-insensitive (e.g., 'A' is considered the same as 'a').
- Spaces should be ignored in the comparison.
- The input strings' lengths are between 1 and 10^5 characters.
Problem Breakdown
To solve this problem, we need to:
- Two strings are anagrams if they contain the same characters with the same frequencies.
- We need to normalize the strings by converting to lowercase and removing spaces.
- We can count the frequency of each character and compare the counts.
- Alternatively, we can sort the characters and compare the sorted strings.
String Problems
Learning Objective
Apply string manipulation concepts to solve a real-world problem.
Word Puzzle Challenge
You're designing a word puzzle game for a popular mobile app. One of the game's features involves anagrams, where players rearrange letters to form new words.
For the game's validation system, you need to create a function that determines if two strings are anagrams of each other. An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once.
Your task is to write a function that takes two strings as input and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, and false otherwise. The function should ignore case sensitivity and consider only alphanumeric characters.
Examples
Example 1:
"listen" and "silent" contain the same letters, just in a different order.
Example 2:
When we ignore spaces and case, both strings contain the same characters with the same frequencies.
Example 3:
These strings contain different characters and cannot be anagrams of each other.
Problem Breakdown
Constraints:
- The input strings consist of alphanumeric characters and spaces.
- The function should be case-insensitive (e.g., 'A' is considered the same as 'a').
- Spaces should be ignored in the comparison.
- The input strings' lengths are between 1 and 10^5 characters.
Key Insights:
Two strings are anagrams if they contain the same characters with the same frequencies.
We need to normalize the strings by converting to lowercase and removing spaces.
We can count the frequency of each character and compare the counts.
Alternatively, we can sort the characters and compare the sorted strings.
Real-World Application
This problem has several practical applications:
Word Games
Anagram checking is fundamental in word games, puzzles, and educational apps.
Language Processing
Natural language processing uses anagram detection for word relationship analysis.
Cryptography
Some cryptographic techniques involve anagram-like permutations of characters.