Valid Anagram

#algorithms #tutorial #beginners #python

In this task, I worked on checking whether two given strings are anagrams of each other. Anagrams are words that contain the same characters but arranged in a different order.

What I Did

I created a function isAnagram that takes two strings as input and returns True if they are anagrams, otherwise False.

For example:
Input: s = "listen", t = "silent"
Output: True

How I Solved It

First, I checked if both strings have the same length. If they don’t, they cannot be anagrams.

Then I used a dictionary to count how many times each character appears in the first string.

After that, I went through the second string:

If a character is not in the dictionary or its count is already zero, I return False
Otherwise, I decrease the count for that character

Code

class Solution:
    def isAnagram(self, s: str, t: str) -> bool:
        if len(s) != len(t):
            return False

        count = {}

        for c in s:
            count[c] = count.get(c, 0) + 1

        for c in t:
            if c not in count or count[c] == 0:
                return False
            count[c] -= 1

        return True