2185 Counting Words With a Given Prefix

You are given an array of strings words and a string pref.

Return the number of strings in words that contain pref as a prefix.

A prefix of a string s is any leading contiguous substring of s.

Example 1:

Input: words = ["pay","attention","practice","attend"], pref = "at"
Output: 2
Explanation: The 2 strings that contain "at" as a prefix are: "attention" and "attend".

Example 2:

Input: words = ["leetcode","win","loops","success"], pref = "code"
Output: 0
Explanation: There are no strings that contain "code" as a prefix.

Constraints:

• 1 <= words.length <= 100
• 1 <= words[i].length, pref.length <= 100
• words[i] and pref consist of lowercase English letters.

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class Solution:
    def prefixCount(self, words: List[str], pref: str) -> int:
        return sum(w.startswith(pref) for w in words)

Follow-up:
Q: What if the words are sorted lexicographically?
A: We can use binary search twice to locate the lower and upper bounds of the words that have the same prefix. Therefore, the time cost is O(klogn). e.g., Assume perf = "abcd", we can search "abcd" and "abce" respectively.