Coding: Anagram Check | Dataford Interview Questions

Envestnet Tamarac may compare user-entered labels that differ in capitalization or punctuation. Write a function that determines whether two strings are anagrams after normalization.

Two strings are normalized by converting uppercase English letters to lowercase and ignoring every character that is not a letter from a through z. The strings are anagrams if their normalized forms contain the same letters with the same frequencies, regardless of order.

Formal Specification

Implement is_anagram(first, second), where both inputs are strings. Return True when the normalized strings are anagrams, and return False otherwise. An empty normalized string is a valid value, so strings containing no English letters are anagrams of one another.

Constraints

0 <= len(first), len(second) <= 10^5
Inputs contain ASCII letters, spaces, digits, and punctuation
Matching is case-insensitive
Only characters from a through z participate
The algorithm should run in linear time

Function Signature

def is_anagram(first, second):

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