- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Array, Hash Table, Two Pointers, String, Dynamic Programming, leetcode-1048, O(n * l^2), O(n * l)
Problem
You are given an array of words
where each word consists of lowercase English letters.
wordA
is a predecessor of wordB
if and only if we can insert exactly one letter anywhere in wordA
without changing the order of the other characters to make it equal to wordB
.
- For example,
"abc"
is a predecessor of"abac"
, while"cba"
is not a predecessor of"bcad"
.
A word chain is a sequence of words [word1, word2, ..., wordk]
with k >= 1
, where word1
is a predecessor of word2
, word2
is a predecessor of word3
, and so on. A single word is trivially a word chain with k == 1
.
Return the length of the longest possible word chain with words chosen from the given list of words
.
Example 1:
Input: words = ["a","b","ba","bca","bda","bdca"] Output: 4 Explanation: One of the longest word chains is ["a","ba","bda","bdca"].
Example 2:
Input: words = ["xbc","pcxbcf","xb","cxbc","pcxbc"] Output: 5 Explanation: All the words can be put in a word chain ["xb", "xbc", "cxbc", "pcxbc", "pcxbcf"].
Example 3:
Input: words = ["abcd","dbqca"] Output: 1 Explanation: The trivial word chain ["abcd"] is one of the longest word chains. ["abcd","dbqca"] is not a valid word chain because the ordering of the letters is changed.
Constraints:
1 <= words.length <= 1000
1 <= words[i].length <= 16
words[i]
only consists of lowercase English letters.