Pattern Matching for Words | Dataford Interview Questions

Convoy's shipment tools may need to filter candidate labels that follow the same repeated-character structure as a requested pattern. Given an array of words and a pattern, return every word that matches the pattern through a one-to-one character mapping.

A word matches when each character in the pattern consistently maps to one character in the word, and no two different pattern characters map to the same word character. Preserve the original word order.

Formal Specification

Implement find_and_replace_pattern(words, pattern), where words is a list of lowercase strings and pattern is a lowercase string. Return a list containing every word with the same length and bijective character structure as pattern.

Constraints

1 <= len(words) <= 10^4
1 <= len(pattern) <= 20
Each word contains 1 to 20 lowercase English letters
Words may have different lengths from the pattern
Return an empty list if no word matches

Function Signature

def find_and_replace_pattern(words, pattern):

Your question is Pattern Matching for Words. Start with the requirements in the Question tab.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

Problem

Formal Specification

Constraints

1 <= len(words) <= 10^4
1 <= len(pattern) <= 20
Each word contains 1 to 20 lowercase English letters
Words may have different lengths from the pattern
Return an empty list if no word matches

Function Signature

def find_and_replace_pattern(words, pattern):

Your question is Pattern Matching for Words. Start with the requirements in the Question tab.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.