How to solve Group Anagrams problem

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An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once.

Let's work with the following:

Input: strs = ["eat","tea","tan","ate","nat","bat"]
Output: [["bat"],["nat","tan"],["ate","eat","tea"]]

Trial 1 - Not efficient:

1. (plus space) copy input

["eat","tea","tan","ate","nat","bat"]

1. (plus time) sort copied input

["aet", "aet", "ant", "aet", "ant", "abt"]

1. (plus space and another space for map/dictionary and plus time) create list and assign same number to same words

[1,1,2,1,2,3]

Well... let's just stop there.

Trial 2 - Hashing:

Hashing? The process of assigning a unique value to an object or attribute using an algorithm, which enables quicker access, is known as hashing.

1. (plus space and time) iterate over each string and each of its character. in every loop, generate a "hash" by increase value at indices representing character (0 -> 'a', 1 -> 'b')

2. once you have a hash, add that a key to a map/dictionary (key-> string, val-> list of strings). then insert word/s.

When you reach this.. you already know what to do. =)