This is a fun one – I am building a profanity checker!
For the purposes of this exercise, let’s have an array of forbidden words, like so:
const forbiddenWords = ['apples', 'oranges', 'blue carrots', 'mushy green peas'];
Then I will have an input field for a user to input the something. It could be an infinite combo of words, but I would like to find ALL instances of the forbidden words and return them as an array. I’ve thought of this function, which gets me really close:
const forbiddenWords = ['apples', 'oranges', 'blue carrots', 'mushy green peas']; const userInput = 'Broccoli is my favorite food. I hate oranges and blue carrots'; const checkIfValidInput = () => { // Will return an array that looks like: ['Broccoli', 'is', 'my', 'favorite', ...] const splitWords = userInput.split(" "); const array = []; for (let i in forbiddenWords) { if (splitWords.indexOf(forbiddenWords[i]) !== -1) { array.push(forbiddenWords[i]); } } return array.sort((x, y) => x - y); };
Running the above will make the result of array be ['oranges', 'blue', 'carrots']
. How could I build out the function to check for 'blue carrots'
or 'mushy green peas'
all in one? I’d like the above function to return: ['oranges', 'blue carrots']
.
Thoughts?
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Answer
You can use regex for this situation. This will also give you ability to match with case insensitivity
const checkIfValidInput = () => { const forbiddenWords = ['apples', 'oranges', 'blue carrots', 'mushy green peas']; const userInput = 'Broccoli is my favorite food. I hate oranges and blue carrots'; const result = forbiddenWords.reduce((acc, words) => { const match = userInput.match(new RegExp(words, ['gi'])) return match ? acc.concat(match) : acc }, []) result.sort() console.log(result) } checkIfValidInput()
Also, array.sort((x, y) => x - y);
is not required as the values you have are string. You can rely on array.sort()
or if you really want to do manual sort, try string.localeCompare(string2)