Suppose we have a list of words called w, with lowercase strings. We have to find the length of the longest sequence of w where each previous word is the prefix of the next word and the next word has just one new character appended.
So, if the input is like w = ["pqr", "pq", "m", "mn", "pqrs"], then the output will be 3 because we can get the sequence: ["pq", "pqr", "pqrs"], whose length is 3.
To solve this, we will follow these steps −
- sort the list w
- dp := a map, where default value for a key is 0
- res := 0
- for each word in w, do
- dp[word] := dp[substring of word up to second last element] + 1
- res := maximum of res and dp[word]
- return res
Example
Let us see the following implementation to get better understanding −
from collections import defaultdict def solve(w): w.sort() dp = defaultdict(int) res = 0 for word in w: dp[word] = dp[word[:-1]] + 1 res = max(res, dp[word]) return res w = ["pqr", "pq", "m", "mn", "pqrs"] print(solve(w))
Input
["pqr", "pq", "m", "mn", "pqrs"]
Output
3