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Solution: Similar String Groups

Explore how to use the union-find data structure to solve the similar string groups problem by grouping strings connected through swapping operations. Understand the step-by-step solution, time and space complexity analysis, and how to apply disjoint set union techniques to efficiently count similarity groups in a list of anagram strings.

Statement

Two strings x and y are considered similar if they are either exactly the same or can be made identical by swapping at most two different characters in string x.

We define a similarity group as a set of strings where each string is similar to at least one other string in the group. A string doesn't need to be directly similar to every other string in the group — it just needs to be connected to them through a chain of similarities.

Given a list of strings strs, where each string is an anagram of the others, your task is to determine how many such similarity groups exist in the list.

Constraints:

  • 11 \leq strs.length 300\leq 300

  • 11 \leq strs[i].length 300\leq 300

  • strs[i] consists of lowercase letters only. ...