Minimum index distance between two given words in a word list

Given a list of words and two different words that both occur in it, return the smallest distance between a position of the first word and a position of the second word. The distance between positions i and j is |i - j|.

Function Signature

def shortest_word_distance(words: list[str], word1: str, word2: str) -> int:

words is the list to search; word1 and word2 are the two words to measure between.

Rules

• Positions are indices into words. Either word may occur several times; consider every pair made of one occurrence of word1 and one occurrence of word2, and return the smallest distance among them.
• The answer does not depend on the order in which word1 and word2 are given.

Constraints

• 2 <= len(words) <= 10^5
• Each word consists of 1 to 20 lowercase English letters
• word1 != word2, and both occur in words at least once

Examples

Example 1

Input: words = ["apple", "kiwi", "pear", "plum", "apple", "fig"], word1 = "pear", word2 = "fig"
Output: 3

pear is at index 2 and fig at index 5, so the distance is 3.

Example 2

Input: words = ["red", "green", "blue", "yellow", "green", "red"], word1 = "yellow", word2 = "red"
Output: 2

yellow is at index 3 and red is at indices 0 and 5. The closer occurrence is at index 5, at distance 2.

Example 3

Input: words = ["a", "b"], word1 = "b", word2 = "a"
Output: 1

The words are adjacent; listing word1 after word2 in the input does not change the answer.