LeetCode 824: Goat Latin

Meta Data

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Difficulty: easy First Attempt: 2022-09-15

• Submissions: Accepted ×2

Approach

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Split into words and convert each (String Template 6): leave a word starting with a vowel (either case) unchanged, otherwise move its first letter to the end; then append "ma" and i + 1 copies of "a" (with i the 0-based word index).

My Solution

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class Solution:
    def toGoatLatin(self, sentence: str) -> str:
        res = []
        for i, w in enumerate(sentence.split()):
            if w[0] not in "aeiouAEIOU":
                w = w[1:] + w[0]
            res.append(w + "ma" + "a" * (i + 1))
        return " ".join(res)

Complexity

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Time O(n + w²) for w words, since the appended as total O(w²); space likewise.

Mistakes to Avoid

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• Vowels include uppercase.
• The first word gets one a, not zero.

Interview Explanation

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I split the sentence, move a leading consonant to the end, append ma plus index + 1 copies of a, and join with spaces.