Shortest Word Distance

Given a list of words and two words word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list. For example, Assume that words = ["practice", "makes", "perfect", "coding", "makes"].

Given word1 = “coding”, word2 = “practice”, return 3. Given word1 = "makes", word2 = "coding", return 1.

Note: You may assume that word1 does not equal to word2, and word1 and word2 are both in the list.

Solution

public class Solution {
     public int shortestDistance(String[] words, String word1, String word2) {
        Map<String, List<Integer>> map = new HashMap<>();

        for(int i = 0; i < words.length; i ++) {
            if (map.containsKey(words[i])) {
                map.get(words[i]).add(i);
            } else {
                List<Integer> indices = new ArrayList<>();
                                indices.add(i);

                map.put(words[i], indices);
            }
        }

        List<Integer> indices1 = map.get(word1);
        List<Integer> indices2 = map.get(word2);

        int distance = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
        for(int i : indices1) {
            for(int j : indices2) {
                distance = Math.min(distance, Math.abs(i-j));
            }
        }

        return distance;
    }}