In an alien language, surprisingly, they also use English lowercase letters, but possibly in a different order. The order of the alphabet is some permutation of lowercase letters.
Given a sequence of words written in the alien language, and the order of the alphabet, return true if and only if the given words are sorted lexicographically in this alien language.
Example 1:
Input: words = ["hello","leetcode"], order = "hlabcdefgijkmnopqrstuvwxyz"
Output: true
Explanation: As 'h' comes before 'l' in this language, then the sequence is sorted.
Example 2:
Input: words = ["word","world","row"], order = "worldabcefghijkmnpqstuvxyz"
Output: false
Explanation: As 'd' comes after 'l' in this language, then words[0] > words[1], hence the sequence is unsorted.
Example 3:
Input: words = ["apple","app"], order = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
Output: false
Explanation: The first three characters "app" match, and the second string is shorter (in size.) According to lexicographical rules "apple" > "app", because 'l' > '∅', where '∅' is defined as the blank character which is less than any other character (More info).
Constraints:
1 <= words.length <= 100
1 <= words[i].length <= 20
order.length == 26
All characters in words[i] and order are English lowercase letters.
Solutions
Solution 1
Thinking
Check that the words are nondecreasing in an alien alphabet. Adjacent pairwise compares work; a column scan also decides it: position \(i\) must be nondecreasing in alien order, treating a missing letter as smaller. If every adjacent pair already differs at this column, later columns can be ignored.