Code Room
CodingHardcod-g164
Subject StringsLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Implement wildcard pattern matching for an entire string. Given an input string s (lowercase letters) and a pattern p containing lowercase letters plus '?' and '*', return True if p matches the ENTIRE string s. '?' matches any single character; '*' matches any sequence of characters including the empty sequence. For example p = "*a*b" matches s = "adceb", but p = "a*c?b" does not match s = "acdcb". An empty pattern matches only the empty string, and "*" matches the empty string. Strings and patterns can be up to a few hundred characters.

Implement
wildcard_match(s: str, p: str) → bool
Examples
in["adceb","*a*b"]outtrue
What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.