Coding: Anagrams Using HashMap | Dataford Interview Questions

TBO tek receives booking-related text from different interfaces, where capitalization, spaces, and punctuation may vary. Write a function that determines whether two strings are anagrams after normalizing them.

Two strings are anagrams if they contain the same alphanumeric characters with the same frequencies, regardless of order. Treat uppercase and lowercase letters as equal, and ignore all non-alphanumeric characters.

Formal Specification

Implement are_anagrams(first, second).

Input: Two strings, first and second.
Output: Return True if the normalized strings are anagrams; otherwise, return False.
Normalization converts letters to lowercase and removes characters for which isalnum() is false.
The function must not modify either input string.

Constraints

0 <= len(first), len(second) <= 10^5
Inputs may contain Unicode alphanumeric characters
Matching is case-insensitive
Non-alphanumeric characters are ignored
The expected target complexity is linear in the combined input length

Function Signature

def are_anagrams(first, second):

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