Anagram checking in Python using collections.Counter()

Write a function to check whether two given strings are anagram of each other or not. An anagram of a string is another string that contains same characters, only the order of characters can be different. For example, “abcd” and “dabc” are anagram of each other.

Examples:

Input : str1 = “abcd”, str2 = “dabc”
Output : True

Input : str1 = “abcf”, str2 = “kabc”
Output : False

Recommended: Please try your approach on {IDE} first, before moving on to the solution.

This problem has existing solution please refer Check whether two strings are anagram of each other link. We will solve this problem in python in a single line using collections.Counter() module.

# Python code to check if two strings are 
# anagram 
from collections import Counter 
  
def anagram(input1, input2): 
  
    # Counter() returns a dictionary data 
    # structure which contains characters  
    # of input as key and their frequencies 
    # as it's corresponding value 
    return Counter(input1) == Counter(input2) 
  
# Driver function 
if __name__ == "__main__": 
    input1 = 'abcd'
    input2 = 'dcab'
    print anagram(input1, input2) 

Output:

True

How dictionary comparison works in python ?
If we have two dictionary data structures in python dict1 = {‘a’:2,’b’:3,’c’:1} and dict2 = {‘b’:3,’c’:1,’a’:2} and we compare both of them like dict1=dict2 then it will result True. In python ordinary dictionary data structure does not follow any ordering of keys, when we compare two dictionaries then it compares three checks in order number of keys (if they don’t match, the dicts are not equal), names of keys (if they don’t match, they’re not equal) and value of each key (they have to be ‘==’, too).

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