Longest Palindrome by Concatenating Two Letter Words LeetCode solution in C++

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class Solution {
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 public:
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  int longestPalindrome(vector<string> &words) {
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    int count[26][26] = {};
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    int ans = 0;
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    for (auto w : words) {
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      int a = w[0] - 'a';
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      int b = w[1] - 'a';
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      if (count[b][a]) {
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        ans += 4;
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        count[b][a]--; // decrement the count as we found mirror word
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      } else
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        count[a][b]++; // increment the current word count if we not find any
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                       // mirror word
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    }
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    for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) {
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      if (count[i][i]) {
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        ans += 2;
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        break;
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      }
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    }
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    return ans;
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  }
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};