Anagrams finder in javascript

Question

I am supposed to write a program in JavaScript to find all the anagrams within a series of words provided. e.g.:

monk, konm, nkom, bbc, cbb, dell, ledl, llde

The output should be categorised into rows:

1. monk konm, nkom; 2. bbc cbb; 3. dell ledl, llde; 

I already sorted them into alphabetical order and put them into an array. i.e.:

kmno kmno bbc bbc dell dell

However I am stuck in comparing and finding the matching anagram within the array.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is my take:

var input = "monk, konm, bbc, cbb, dell, ledl"; var words = input.split(", ");  for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) {    var word = words[i];   var alphabetical = word.split("").sort().join("");    for (var j = 0; j < words.length; j++) {      if (i === j) {       continue;     }      var other = words[j];     if (alphabetical === other.split("").sort().join("")) {       console.log(word + " - " + other + " (" + i + ", " + j + ")");     }   } }

where the output would be (the word, the match and the index of both):

monk - konm (0, 1) konm - monk (1, 0) bbc - cbb (2, 3) cbb - bbc (3, 2) dell - ledl (4, 5) ledl - dell (5, 4) 

To get the characters in the in alphabetical order, I used split("") ot get an array, called sort() and used join("") to get a string from the array.

Answer 2

Javascript objects are excellent for this purpose, since they are essentially key/value stores:

// Words to match var words = ["dell", "ledl", "abc", "cba"];  // The output object var anagrams = {};  for (var i in words) {     var word = words[i];      // sort the word like you've already described     var sorted = sortWord(word);      // If the key already exists, we just push     // the new word on the the array     if (anagrams[sorted] != null) {         anagrams[sorted].push(word);     }      // Otherwise we create an array with the word     // and insert it into the object     else {         anagrams[sorted] = [ word ];     } }  // Output result for (var sorted in anagrams) {     var words = anagrams[sorted];     var sep = ",";     var out = "";     for (var n in words) {         out += sep + words[n];         sep = "";     }     document.writeln(sorted + ": " + out + "<br />"); }