How To Check If Two Strings Contain Same Characters Python

In this tutorial, we will learn how to check if two strings contain the same characters using Python. This can be a useful operation in various applications, such as anagram checkers, encryption algorithms, and analyzing text data.

Step 1: Normalize the Strings

First, we need to normalize the input strings by converting them to lowercase. This is because we want to compare the characters in a case-insensitive way. For instance, ‘A’ and ‘a’ should be considered the same character.

To convert a string to lowercase in Python, we can use the lower() method as follows:

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string1 = "Hello"
normalized_string1 = string1.lower()

Step 2: Sort the Strings

After normalizing the input strings, we need to sort them in alphabetical order. By doing this, we can easily check if they have the same characters or not.

In Python, we can use the sorted() function to sort the characters of the input strings:

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sorted_string1 = "".join(sorted(normalized_string1))

Step 3: Compare the Sorted Strings

Now that we have normalized and sorted the input strings, we can compare them to check if they have the same characters. If the sorted strings are equal, it means that they have the same characters. Otherwise, the input strings have different characters.

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def same_characters(string1, string2):
    normalized_string1 = string1.lower()
    normalized_string2 = string2.lower()
 
    sorted_string1 = "".join(sorted(normalized_string1))
    sorted_string2 = "".join(sorted(normalized_string2))
 
    return sorted_string1 == sorted_string2

Testing the Function

Let’s test the same_characters function with a few examples:

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# Test case 1
string1 = "angel"
string2 = "glean"
print(same_characters(string1, string2))  # True
 
# Test case 2
string1 = "Listen"
string2 = "Silent"
print(same_characters(string1, string2))  # True
 
# Test case 3
string1 = "hello"
string2 = "world"
print(same_characters(string1, string2))  # False
 
True
True
False

As you can see from the output, the function works correctly in determining if two strings contain the same characters or not.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to check if two strings contain the same characters using Python.

By normalizing, sorting and then comparing the input strings, we can determine if they share the same characters.

The code can be further optimized by using other data structures like sets or dictionaries or adding additional functionality such as counting the occurrences of each character within the strings.