243. Shortest Word Distance

• Difficulty: Easy

• Topics: Array

• Similar Questions:

  • Shortest Word Distance II

  • Shortest Word Distance III

Problem:

Given a list of words and two words word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.

Example:
Assume that words = ["practice", "makes", "perfect", "coding", "makes"].

Input: word1 = “coding”, word2 = “practice”
Output: 3

Input: word1 = "makes", word2 = "coding"
Output: 1

Note:
You may assume that word1 does not equal to word2, and word1 and word2 are both in the list.

Solutions:

class Solution {
public:
    int shortestDistance(vector<string>& words, string word1, string word2) {
        int index1 = -1;
        int index2 = -1;

        int distance = INT_MAX;

        for (int i = 0; i < words.size(); ++i) {
            if (words[i] == word1) {
                index1 = i;
                if (index2 != -1)
                    distance = min(distance, i - index2);
            } else if (words[i] == word2) {
                index2 = i;
                if (index1 != -1) {
                    distance = min(distance, i - index1);
                }
            }
        }

        return distance;
    }
};