How should I practice Sort Words by a Custom Alphabet?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related Bloomberg LP phone screen problems in FastPrep.

Is Sort Words by a Custom Alphabet associated with Bloomberg LP?

FastPrep tags this as a Bloomberg LP phone screen coding practice problem when the problem catalog has that company and stage context.

Sort Words by a Custom Alphabet

Bloomberg LP● MediumNEW GRADPHONE SCREEN

Learn

Problem statement

You are given a custom alphabet order and an array of lowercase words. Sort the words lexicographically under that custom order.

Compare the first position where two words differ using the characters' ranks in alphabet. If one word is a prefix of the other, the shorter word comes first. Return the sorted words.

Function

sortWordsByAlphabet(alphabet: String, words: String[]) → String[]

Examples

Example 1

alphabet = "zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba"words = ["apple","app","banana"]return = ["banana","app","apple"]

Under the reversed alphabet, b precedes a. Among the two a-words, app is a prefix of apple.

Example 2

alphabet = "bacdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"words = ["ab","aa","ba","b"]return = ["b","ba","ab","aa"]

b-words come before a-words; prefixes come first; and within the a-words, the second character b ranks before a.

Example 3

alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"words = []return = []

An empty word array remains empty.

Constraints

alphabet is a permutation of the 26 lowercase English letters.
0 <= words.length <= 100000.
Every word is nonempty and contains only lowercase English letters.
The total number of characters across words is at most 200000.