alphabet-board-path

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1138. Alphabet Board Path (Medium)

On an alphabet board, we start at position (0, 0), corresponding to character board[0][0].

Here, board = ["abcde", "fghij", "klmno", "pqrst", "uvwxy", "z"], as shown in the diagram below.

We may make the following moves:

• 'U' moves our position up one row, if the position exists on the board;
• 'D' moves our position down one row, if the position exists on the board;
• 'L' moves our position left one column, if the position exists on the board;
• 'R' moves our position right one column, if the position exists on the board;
• '!' adds the character board[r][c] at our current position (r, c) to the answer.

(Here, the only positions that exist on the board are positions with letters on them.)

Return a sequence of moves that makes our answer equal to target in the minimum number of moves.  You may return any path that does so.

 

Example 1:

Input: target = "leet"
Output: "DDR!UURRR!!DDD!"

Example 2:

Input: target = "code"
Output: "RR!DDRR!UUL!R!"

 

Constraints:

• 1 <= target.length <= 100
• target consists only of English lowercase letters.

Related Topics

[Hash Table] [String]

Hints

Hint 1

Create a hashmap from letter to position on the board.

Hint 2

Now for each letter, try moving there in steps, where at each step you check if it is inside the boundaries of the board.