5
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Two words are anagrams of each other if they contain the same letters, such as "pots == stop".

The easiest way to check is to sort both words, then compare. But that's an \$O(n*log(n))\$ solution and I'd like to find an \$O(n)\$ one.

  1. Is this code \$O(n)\$? I only make one pass per string, but I use a hash Remove which is \$O(n)\$ by itself.

  2. Is there a completely better way? Or can my code be optimized to run faster/cleaner?

public static bool AreAnagrams(string str1, string str2)
{
    //lucky cases
    if(str1 == str2)
        return true;
    if(str1.Length != str2.Length)
        return false;

    Dictionary<char, int> letters = new Dictionary<char, int>();

    //put all the letters for str1 and their occurance in dictionary
    foreach(char c in str1.AsEnumerable<char>())
    {
        if(letters.ContainsKey(c))
            letters[c]++;
        else
            letters[c] = 1;
    }

    //remove matched letters
    foreach(char c in str2.AsEnumerable<char>())
    {
        if(letters.ContainsKey(c))
        {
            letters[c]--;
            if(letters[c] == 0)
                letters.Remove(c);
        }
        //found a letter that wasn't in str1
        else
            return false;
    }

    //true if we added all the letters and removed them all
    return letters.Values.Count == 0;
}
\$\endgroup\$
3
  • \$\begingroup\$ Dictionary.Remove() is O(1), in the average case. \$\endgroup\$
    – svick
    Apr 13, 2012 at 6:54
  • \$\begingroup\$ that's what I get for skimming wikipedia. So then my code is O(n) and as fast as it's going to get? \$\endgroup\$
    – jb.
    Apr 13, 2012 at 7:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ For this kind of algorithms I find big O notation misleading. The algorithm is not going to escalate to large N's so, who cares for asymptotic complexity? O(2N) and O(10N) are both O(N), but for n < 10, O(N^2) beats O(10N) Are you going to check anagrams on long words? Don't think so... Bear in mind I'm not saying O(N^2) is not bad, I'm saying that for low N's, the linear factor actually matters because N's order is not that important, so big O is misleading. Correct me if I'm wrong! \$\endgroup\$
    – kaoD
    Apr 20, 2012 at 13:00

4 Answers 4

5
\$\begingroup\$

The Remove call is not necessary - in python:

def anagram(w1, w2):
    from collections import Counter
    counter = Counter()
    for c in w1:
        counter[c] += 1
    for c in w2:
        counter[c] -= 1
    for count in counter.values():
        if count != 0:
            return False
    return True
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4
\$\begingroup\$

Yes, it's probably as fast as it gets (apart from a possible mistake that I'll explain). The average-case complexity of Remove is O(1), and it seems unlikely to me that you could skip any characters in a string since string comparison is O(n) and anagram checking is likely more complex than that. As a first guess, the asymptotic complexity of this algorithm is probably O(n)+O(n^2)=O(n^2) (n^2 because you are doing an O(n) operation for O(n) characters when calling Remove).

The average-case complexity of you algorithm is O(2n)=O(n), which is not bad at all for this problem. I think your implementation is likely to outperform the sorting one because the hash tables behave very well with a low amount of elements (if you mean anagrams in the sense of real words, you will have relatively small inputs).

Now, this line might not do what you intended:

if(str1 == str2)

According to the MSDN, this will compare the values of the strings, not their references, which is already an O(n) operation in itself:

For the string type, == compares the values of the strings.

If your intention was to compare the references (as an easy case), you must cast the strings to object and compare those:

if ((object)str1 == (object)str2)

It's important to note that it doesn't matter from the viewpoint of asymptotic complexity if you are doing an O(n) comparison here, since the O(n^2) later will dominate the complexity anyway. But for amortized complexity it matters, and that is important if you are dealing with small inputs.

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1
  • 2
    \$\begingroup\$ Better yet: object.ReferenceEquals(str1, str2). \$\endgroup\$
    – ANeves
    Apr 13, 2012 at 16:37
2
\$\begingroup\$
Dictionary<char, int> letters = new Dictionary<char, int>();

If you only need to support the 26 English letters, then using int array of size 26 will be more efficient and produce cleaner code.

\$\endgroup\$
2
  • \$\begingroup\$ This is a great idea, I suggest you add the full solution I suspect the entire code will be very short and easy. \$\endgroup\$
    – Leonid
    Apr 16, 2012 at 0:05
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @Leonid, I'm hesitant to do that because I don't code in C#. The whole thing would be a one liner in my favored language, python. return Counter(w1) == Counter(w2) \$\endgroup\$ Apr 17, 2012 at 19:20
1
\$\begingroup\$

The use of Remove is not needed though.

You can have something like

if(letters.ContainsKey(c) || letters[c] > 0)
    letters[c]--;
else //found a letter that wasn't in str1
    return false;
\$\endgroup\$
1
  • \$\begingroup\$ Hmm, one extra unnecessary access. Perhaps if(!letters.ContainsKey(c) || letters[c]-- <= 0) { return false }? But this starts to get a bit criptic. \$\endgroup\$
    – ANeves
    Apr 13, 2012 at 16:39

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