Community Problem

Valid Anagram

Difficulty: Easy

Decide whether two strings are anagrams of each other in O(n) using a frequency map.

Valid Anagram

Decide whether two strings are anagrams of each other in O(n) using a frequency map.

EASY
Free
strings
hash-map
fundamentals
ezb1981

By @ezb1981

March 22, 2026

·

Updated May 18, 2026

381 views

7

3.8 (11)

Two strings are anagrams when they contain the exact same letters with the exact same frequencies, possibly rearranged. "listen" and "silent" are anagrams; "hello" and "world" are not. This is the gateway problem for hash-map frequency counting and one of the most common warm-up questions in a phone screen.

Valid Anagram

Given two strings s and t, return true if t is an anagram of s, and false otherwise.

Examples

Example 1:

  • Input: s = "anagram", t = "nagaram"
  • Output: true

Example 2:

  • Input: s = "rat", t = "car"
  • Output: false

Example 3:

  • Input: s = "", t = ""
  • Output: true

Constraints

  • 0 <= s.length, t.length <= 5 * 10^4
  • s and t consist of lowercase ASCII letters only.

Follow-up

What if the inputs contained Unicode characters? Does your O(1)-extra-space-with-fixed-alphabet approach still hold up, or do you need to fall back to a hash map?

Solution

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