Shortest Word Distance

243. Shortest Word Distance

Given a list of words and two words word1 and word2, return the shortest distance between these two words in the list.

For example,
Assume that words = ["practice", "makes", "perfect", "coding", "makes"].

Given word1 = “coding”, word2 = “practice”, return 3.
Given word1 = "makes", word2 = "coding", return 1.

Note:
You may assume that word1 does not equal to word2, and word1 and word2 are both in the list.

public class Solution {
    public int shortestDistance(String[] words, String word1, String word2) {
        if (words == null || word1 == null || word2 == null) {
            return 0;
        }
        
        int index1 = -1, index2 = -1;
        int distance = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
        
        for (int i = 0; i < words.length; i++) {
            String word = words[i];
            
            if (word.equals(word1)) {
                index1 = i;
            }
            if (word.equals(word2)) {
                index2 = i;
            }
            
            if (index1 != -1 && index2 != -1) {
                distance = Math.min(distance, Math.abs(index1 - index2));
            }
        }
        
        return distance;
    }
}

Hope this helps,
Michael