804 Unique Morse Code Words

Intuition

If you are wondering how two messages/words produce the same morse code - it’s because there’s no space or delimiter while generating a code for a word.

In a real setting, due to some delimiter (most probably space) - two distinct words will have two distinct morse codes.

Use a set to store computed codes, and return the number of distinct codes.

Code

Python3

def uniqueMorseRepresentations(self, words: List[str]) -> int:
    cipher = [".-","-...","-.-.","-..",".","..-.","--.","....","..",".---","-.-",".-..","--","-.","---",".--.","--.-",".-.","...","-","..-","...-",".--","-..-","-.--","--.."]
    '''
    the cipher table is provided in the problem description
    '''
    computed = set()
 
    for w in words:
        code = ''
 
        for c in w:
            code += cipher[ord(c) - ord('a')]
        
        if code not in computed:
            computed.add(code)
            
    return len(computed)

Big O Analysis

• Runtime

  The runtime complexity here is $O(N\ast k)$ where N is number of words, and k is variable length of each word.

• Memory

  The memory usage is $O(N)$ since we are using a set to store computed cipher code.

— A

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