Pattern visualizer

Group Anagrams

Every anagram shares the same sorted-letter key (e.g. "eat" and "tea" both sort to "aet"). Bucket each word by that key in a map, then return the buckets. Reach for it whenever grouping strings by a shared signature. Animated on: ["eat","tea","tan","ate","nat","bat"] — group words that are anagrams of each other.

Strings

step 1 / 8

eat

[0]

tea

[1]

tan

[2]

ate

[3]

nat

[4]

bat

[5]

line 2

For each word, sort its letters into a key and drop it into that key's bucket.

Pseudocode

1FUNCTION groupAnagrams(words):
2  make an empty lookup table (sorted-letters key -> list of words)
3  FOR each word in words:
4    key = the word's letters sorted and joined into a string
5    IF key is not in the table: store key -> an empty list
6    add word to the list stored for key
7  END FOR
8  RETURN all the lists in the table
9END FUNCTION

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