First Occurrence of a Word | Dataford Interview Questions

Find the first occurrence of a word in a sentence, e.g. sentence 'can a cat eat grass cat?', pet 'cat' returns 6.

Asked in the round 3 stage. Implement the function using zero-based character indexing. Treat pet as a case-sensitive contiguous substring, including occurrences inside longer words.

Input and Output

find_first_occurrence(sentence, pet) receives two strings and returns the starting index of the first occurrence, or -1 if pet does not occur. If pet is empty, return 0.

Constraints

0 <= len(sentence) <= 5,000
0 <= len(pet) <= 500
Matching is case-sensitive
Return a character index, not a word index
An empty pet returns 0

Function Signature

def find_first_occurrence(sentence, pet):

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Problem