Code RoomAt most one edit
MediumPrep Room Coding #1381

At most one edit

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresEntry–Mid~20 min

Given two lowercase strings a and b, determine whether they are at most one edit apart, where an edit is inserting a character, deleting a character, or replacing a single character. Identical strings count as zero edits (return true). Return true iff they differ by zero or one edit. Lengths up to a few thousand.

Implement
one_edit_away(a: str, b: str) → bool
Examples
in["pale","ple"]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.

0:00 of about 20 min
InputExpectedGot
["pale","ple"]truenot run yetsample