Valid Anagram

Problem

Given two strings s and t, return true if t is an anagram of s, and false otherwise.

Click the above card to go to the problem on leetcode.

Approach

What he heck is an anagram?

cat and tac are words that have been rearranged using the same alphabets. Now that’s an anagram.

So, we are given two strings and we need to check if they are anagrams or not.

We are going to use a hashmap to solve this question, since the letters are only rearranged in an anagram - we can easily take the count of how many occurrences each word has and then compare them.

Solution

class Solution:
    def isAnagram(self, s: str, t: str) -> bool:

        char_s = {}
        char_t = {}

        for char in s:
            char_s[char] = char_s.get(char, 0) +1

        for char in t:
            char_t[char] = char_t.get(char, 0) +1

        return char_s == char_t

Look at how I am using get() to fetch the character and the count of the occurrences? It’s a pretty neat trick - quick and easy.

That’s it.

the .get() when using a hashmap is somewhat of a lifesaver. Trust me, you’ll be using it in a lot of places. So, get familiar with it, see how you can use it in multiple scenarios.