finding if two words are anagrams of each other

Question

I am looking for a method to find if two strings are anagrams of one another.

Ex: string1 - abcde
string2 - abced
Ans = true
Ex: string1 - abcde
string2 - ab         


        

Answer 1

For known (and small) sets of valid letters (e.g. ASCII) use a table with counts associated with each valid letter. First string increments counts, second string decrements counts. Finally iterate through the table to see if all counts are zero (strings are anagrams) or there are non-zero values (strings are not anagrams). Make sure to convert all characters to uppercase (or lowercase, all the same) and to ignore white space.

For a large set of valid letters, such as Unicode, do not use table but rather use a hash table. It has O(1) time to add, query and remove and O(n) space. Letters from first string increment count, letters from second string decrement count. Count that becomes zero is removed form the hash table. Strings are anagrams if at the end hash table is empty. Alternatively, search terminates with negative result as soon as any count becomes negative.

Here is the detailed explanation and implementation in C#: Testing If Two Strings are Anagrams