Code Room
CodingHardcod-g791
Subject BacktrackingLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given a `pattern` of lowercase letters and a string `s`, return true if there is a bijection between letters in `pattern` and non-empty substrings of `s` such that replacing each pattern letter with its substring yields exactly `s`. The mapping must be one-to-one in both directions (no two letters map to the same substring, and each letter maps to exactly one substring). Both inputs have length 1..20.

Implement
word_pattern_match(pattern: str, s: str) → bool
Examples
in["abab","redblueredblue"]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.