Ransom Note

Given two strings ransomNote and magazine, return true if ransomNote can be constructed by using the letters from magazine and false otherwise.

Each letter in magazine can only be used once in ransomNote.

Example 1:

Input: ransomNote = "a", magazine = "b"
Output: false

Example 2:

Input: ransomNote = "aa", magazine = "ab"
Output: false

Example 3:

Input: ransomNote = "aa", magazine = "aab"
Output: true

Solution

We just need to make sure that the magazine is a superset of the ransom note, because if we have spare letters in the magazine, that’s ok, but not otherwise.

Luckily, Counter does this out of the box.

from collections import Counter

class Solution:
    def canConstruct(self, ransomNote: str, magazine: str) -> bool:
        return Counter(magazine) >= Counter(ransomNote)

Table of Contents

Ransom Note

Solution