How to check whether two words are anagrams python

Question

I'm dealing with a simple problem:

• checking if two strings are anagrams.

I wrote the simple code that can check whether two strings, such as 'abcd' and 'dcba', are anagrams, but I have no idea what to do with more complex ones, like "Astronomer" and "Moon starter."

line1 = input('Enter the first word: ')
line2 = input('Enter the second word: ')

def deleteSpaces(s):
    s_new = s.replace(" ","")
    return s_new


def anagramSolution2(s1,s2):
    alist1 = list(deleteSpaces(s1))
    alist2 = list(deleteSpaces(s2))

    print(alist1)
    print(alist2)

    alist1.sort()
    alist2.sort()

    pos = 0
    matches = True

    while pos < len(deleteSpaces(s1)) and matches:
        if alist1[pos]==alist2[pos]:
            pos = pos + 1
        else:
            matches = False

    return matches

Firstly I thought that the problem lies in working with spaces, but then I understood that my algorithm doesn't work if the strings are not the same size.

I have no idea what to do in that case.

Here I found a beautiful solution, but it doesn't work either:

def anagrams(s1,s2):
    return [False, True][sum([ord(x) for x in s1]) == sum([ord(x) for x in s2])]

If I run this function and test it on two strings, I'll get such output:

Examples:

First Word: apple
Second Word: pleap

output: True

First Word: Moon starter
Second Word: Astronomer

output: False //however it should should be True because this words are anagrams 

Answer 1

Your algorithm is ok. Your problem is that you don't consider upper and lower case letters. Changing the two lines

alist1 = list(deleteSpaces(s1))
alist2 = list(deleteSpaces(s2))

to

alist1 = list(deleteSpaces(s1).lower())
alist2 = list(deleteSpaces(s2).lower())

will solve your issue. As an alternative you could simply use the following function:

def anagrams(s1, s2):
    def sort(s):
        return sorted(s.replace(" ", "").lower())
    return sort(s1) == sort(s2)

If you want to have a faster solution with complexity of O(n), you should use a Counter instead of sorting the two words:

from collections import Counter

def anagrams(s1, s2):
    def get_counter(s):
        return Counter(s.replace(" ", "").lower())

    return get_counter(s1) == get_counter(s2)