3.23. Anagram

Two words are anagrams if they consist of the same letters, but in a different order. For example, “palm” and “lamp” are anagrams because each contains one ‘p’, one ‘a’, one ‘l’, and one ‘m’. Write a function named as anagram that takes two strings as arguments, and returns True if the strings are anagrams or returns False otherwise.

Hint: You can use dictionaries to keep track of different characters in the input string and count them.

Sample I/O:

>>> anagram('palm', 'lamp')
True

>>> anagram('hello', 'olla')
False

Show the Answer

def anagram(str1, str2):
    count_1 = {}
    for char in str1:
        if char in count_1:
            count_1[char] += 1
        else:
            count_1[char] = 1

    count_2 = {}
    for char in str2:
        if char in count_2:
            count_2[char] += 1
        else:
            count_2[char] = 1

    if count_1 == count_2:
        return True
    else:
        return False