Vowel Spellchecker · Interview Problem

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Leetcode

Medium

Hash Maps

Strings

Google

Microsoft

Vowel Spellchecker

Return the best match for each query word using exact, case-insensitive, and vowel-insensitive matching rules.

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Problem Statement

You are given a wordlist and a list of query words. For each query, return the first word from the wordlist that matches according to the following priority:

Exact match: the query is identical to a word in the wordlist.
Case-insensitive match: the query matches a word after converting both to lowercase.
Vowel-error match: the query matches a word after converting both to lowercase and replacing every vowel (a, e, i, o, u) with a placeholder.

If multiple words could match, return the one that appears earliest in the wordlist. If no word matches, return an empty string.

Build a checker that processes every query independently using these rules.

Input Format

An array wordlist of strings.
An array queries of strings.

For each query, apply the matching rules in priority order and return the chosen word or an empty string.

Output Format

Return an array of strings where the i-th string is the answer for queries[i].

Constraints

1 <= wordlist.length, queries.length <= 5000
Words contain only English letters.
Matching must respect the priority: exact > case-insensitive > vowel-insensitive.
If several words satisfy the same rule, choose the earliest one in wordlist.

Examples

Sample cases returned by the problem API.

Example 1

Input

wordlist = ["KiTe","kite","hare","Hare"], queries = ["kite","Kite","KiTe","Hare","HARE","Hear","hear","keti","keet","keto"]

Output

["kite","KiTe","KiTe","Hare","hare","","","KiTe","","KiTe"]

Explanation

Exact matches are preferred when available.
Otherwise, matching ignores case.
Otherwise, matching ignores vowels.
If no rule matches, return an empty string.

Example 2

Input

wordlist = ["yellow"], queries = ["YALLOW","yellow","yellOw"]

Output

["yellow","yellow","yellow"]

Explanation

The lowercase-vowel-normalized form of all queries matches yellow, and the exact/case-insensitive matches also resolve to yellow.

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