The question
Given two strings, check if they’re anagrams or not. Two strings are anagrams if they are written using the same exact letters, ignoring space, punctuation and capitalization. Each letter should have the same count in both strings. For example, ‘Eleven plus two’ and ‘Twelve plus one’ are meaningful anagrams of each other.
My solution
The solution I came up with consists of having a hash-table where we will store how many times a character is found in string1. Then we will do the same for string2. At the end these should match.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
var string1 = 'I like to eat tacos';
var string2 = 'A cat like ties too';
var string3 = 'I like to eat burritos';
function areAnagrams(s1, s2) {
// Make them lowercase so we don't have to worry about that
s1 = s1.toLowerCase();
s2 = s2.toLowerCase();
var letters = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv';
var found = {};
// Add the keys to the hashtable
for (var i = 0; i < s1.length; i++) {
// Only do it if it is a letter
if (-1 !== letters.indexOf(s1[i])) {
if (undefined === found[s1[i]]) {
// If this is the first time we see this letter then count is 1
found[s1[i]] = 1;
} else {
// Increase the count for this letter
found[s1[i]]++;
}
}
}
// Check all letters in s2
for (i = 0; i < s2.length; i++) {
// We only care about letters
if (-1 !== letters.indexOf(s2[i])) {
// If the letter is not there or it is already 0 then this is not
// an anagram
if (!found[s2[i]]) {
return false;
}
found[s2[i]]--;
}
}
// Check that at the end all letters are 0
for (i in found) {
if (found[i] !== 0) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
function test() {
if (areAnagrams(string1, string2) && !areAnagrams(string1, string3)) {
console.log('success');
}
}
test(); // Prints success
The complexity of this is something line O(n) + O(m) because you have to go through both strings once to find if they have the same letters.
computer_science algorithms javascript programming