Hangman implementation [duplicate]

Question

SITUATION

I started to implement the game "HANGMAN" using only JavaScript and HTML on client side machines. I have completed all the logical work. Now only the aesthetics are remaining. And I am stuck up because we can't write to strings in JS.

a = "abcd"; a[0] = "e"; -- This type of thing is not allowed.

What I have done

CODE

The code I have tried, This does not work:

See here

I now have the following three arrays:

a -- The array that contains the letters of the word(for gel this would be g,e,l)

gai -- This array consists of the letters that have been entered by the user and are there in the word.(like g or e)

ag -- This array consists of the letters that have been entered by the user regardless of whether or not they are there in the word to be guessed or not.

What I need to do

I need to generate the output that would show the letter in case it has been guessed by the user and is there in the word(letters in the array gai) and _ in place of letters that have not yet been entered by the user.

What I want

A function that will return the desired output, as explained in the following example.

Example

Let the word to be guessed be:

together

User enters e:

The function should return: _ _ _ e _ _ e _

User then enters d, my program will prompt him to say that this letter is not there in the word.

User enters r

Function should return: _ _ _ e _ _ e r

And so on....

I hope you get the idea!

In case you don't get it(owing to my bad explanation or otherwise!!)

You can play a game of hangman here: Hangman

Just watch the output at the bottom of the screen... Thats what I want this function to generate.

Kindly help me with this issue!

Answer 1

Reading just the start of your question (because no other code is provided), there is a problem which could be solved using native javascript functions.

var strarr = "Hello world!".split(''); // this will give you an array of characters to be manipulated
strarr[6] = "X"; // so you can do this
console.dir(strarr.join('')); // test it!

As an idea (not mine, its from comments) one could even wrap this simple code as a missing toCharArray() function and use that.

Another thing is that this method is fast enough even for relatively large bulk of text. For a test I used lorem ipsum with 1000 words. On my rather old dev machine, manipulation executes in milliseconds.

For more information, see this discussion.