Minimum Characters For Words

Category: Strings

Difficulty: Medium

Description

Write a function that takes in an array of words and returns the smallest array of characters needed to form all of the words. The characters don't need to be in any particular order.

For example, the characters ["y", "r", "o", "u"] are needed to form the words ["your", "you", "or", "yo"].

Note: the input words won't contain any spaces; however, they might contain punctuation and/or special characters.

Sample Input

words = ["this", "that", "did", "deed", "them!", "a"]

Sample Output

["t", "t", "h", "i", "s", "a", "d", "d", "e", "e", "m", "!"]
// The characters could be ordered differently.

Optimal Space & Time Complexity

O(n * l) time | O(c) space - where n is the number of words, l is the length of the longest word, and c is the number of unique characters across all words\nSee notes under video explanation for details about the space complexity.