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Goat Latin

You are given a string sentence that consist of words separated by spaces. Each word consists of lowercase and uppercase letters only.

We would like to convert the sentence to "Goat Latin" (a made-up language similar to Pig Latin.) The rules of Goat Latin are as follows:

  • If a word begins with a vowel ('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', or 'u'), append "ma" to the end of the word.
    • For example, the word "apple" becomes "applema".
  • If a word begins with a consonant (i.e., not a vowel), remove the first letter and append it to the end, then add "ma".
    • For example, the word "goat" becomes "oatgma".
  • Add one letter 'a' to the end of each word per its word index in the sentence, starting with 1.
    • For example, the first word gets "a" added to the end, the second word gets "aa" added to the end, and so on.

Return the final sentence representing the conversion from sentence to Goat Latin.

 

Example 1:

Input: sentence = "I speak Goat Latin"
Output: "Imaa peaksmaaa oatGmaaaa atinLmaaaaa"

Example 2:

Input: sentence = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"
Output: "heTmaa uickqmaaa rownbmaaaa oxfmaaaaa umpedjmaaaaaa overmaaaaaaa hetmaaaaaaaa azylmaaaaaaaaa ogdmaaaaaaaaaa"

 

Constraints:

  • 1 <= sentence.length <= 150
  • sentence consists of English letters and spaces.
  • sentence has no leading or trailing spaces.
  • All the words in sentence are separated by a single space.

Solution Explanation for Goat Latin

This problem involves transforming a sentence into "Goat Latin" according to specific rules. The solution involves iterating through each word, applying transformations based on whether it starts with a vowel or consonant, and then adding 'a's based on the word's position.

Algorithm:

  1. Split the sentence into words: The input sentence is first split into individual words using space as a delimiter.

  2. Iterate through each word: The code iterates through each word in the sentence.

  3. Vowel or Consonant Check: For each word:

    • It checks if the first letter (case-insensitive) is a vowel (a, e, i, o, u).
    • If it's a vowel, "ma" is appended to the end.
    • If it's a consonant, the first letter is moved to the end, and then "ma" is appended.

  4. Append 'a's: The number of 'a's appended to each word corresponds to its index (starting from 1). So the first word gets one 'a', the second gets two, and so on.

  5. Join the words: Finally, the modified words are joined back together with spaces to form the Goat Latin sentence.

Time Complexity Analysis:

  • Splitting the sentence: O(n), where n is the length of the sentence. Splitting a string takes linear time in the worst case.
  • Iterating through words: O(m), where m is the number of words in the sentence. This loop iterates once per word.
  • Word transformations: The operations within the loop (checking for vowels, moving letters, appending strings) take constant time, O(1), relative to the word length.
  • Joining the words: O(m*k), where k is the average length of a word. Joining strings can take linear time in the total length of the strings.

Therefore, the overall time complexity is dominated by the splitting and joining steps, resulting in O(n + m*k). In most cases, this can be considered approximately linear, O(n), because m (number of words) is usually proportional to n (sentence length) and k (average word length) is relatively small and constant.

Space Complexity Analysis:

The space complexity depends on the size of the intermediate data structures:

  • The list or array to store the modified words has a size proportional to the number of words, O(m).
  • The modified words themselves take space proportional to the sentence length, O(n).

Thus, the overall space complexity is O(n), which is linear in the input sentence length.

Code Examples with Explanations:

The code examples in Python, Java, TypeScript, and Rust all follow the same basic algorithm described above. Each language has its own syntax, but the core logic remains consistent. Key points to observe are:

  • Vowel checking: Often uses regular expressions (e.g., /[aeiou]/i in TypeScript) or a set of vowels for efficient checking.
  • String manipulation: Languages provide efficient string manipulation functions (e.g., slicing in Python, substring in Java, slice in TypeScript) for moving characters around.
  • String concatenation: Appending "ma" and 'a's can be done with string concatenation or more efficient methods provided by the language (e.g., += in Python, append in Java's StringBuilder).

The choice of which language to use depends on personal preference and the context of the problem. All four languages presented provide clear and efficient solutions to the Goat Latin problem.