# September LeetCoding Challenge, Day 7: Word Pattern

September 8, 2020

This is part of a series of posts about the September LeetCoding Challenge. Check the first post for more information.

The problem for September 7 is Word Pattern. You’re given two strings. One of them consists of lowercase letters and the other consists of lowercase letters separated by spaces. You want to find out if a bijection exists between the characters of the first string and the words in the second string. In other words, you want to return true if there is a one-to-one correspondence between the characters of the first string and the characters of the second string, and false otherwise.

If the number of words is different from the number of characters, then you can be sure that no bijection exists. If the number of words is the same, we can go word by word and check if a word happens to be mapped to different characters. If it does, then no bijection exists. This is still not sufficient to determine a bijection, since the same character can still be mapped to different words. In order for a bijection to exist, the number of different words must be equal to the number of different characters. Combining all those checks lets us determine if there is a one-to-one correspondence between characters and words. The following is an implementation of the previous idea: