array and hashmap August 22, 2022

Check if a word occurs as a prefix of any word in a sentence

Time O(n) Space O(n) Open original problem

We will split the string with space then iterate over each word to check the prefix, if we find one, we return the position of the word in the sentence, else we return -1.

class Solution:
    def isPrefixOfWord(self, sentence: str, searchWord: str) -> int:
        sentence = sentence.split(" ")
        for i, word in enumerate(sentence):
            if word.startswith(searchWord):
                return i+1
        return -1

Time Complexity: O(n)
Space Complexity: O(n)