Tag Archives: anagram

javascript anagram detector

Aside

what’s the shortest anagram detector you know how to write, in javascript?

there must be a shorter way to do this. highlight below to see a solution.


var anagramDetector = function (x,y) {
   if (x.length != y.length) return false;
   var alpha_x = x.split("").sort().join("");
   var alpha_y = y.split("").sort().join("");
   for ( j = 0; j<y.length;++j) {
       if (alpha_x[j] != alpha_y[j]) return false;
  }
  return true;
}

PS: there’s a cool method for solving this for a fixed alphabet, using primes

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detecting anagrams in python

Aside

what’s the shortest anagram detector you know how to write, in python?

this is one that keeps feeling like it should be a one liner (because it’s very similar to this one liner), but i suspect can’t be done in one line

highlight to see a solution.


def fn(x,y):
    if len(x) != len(y):
        return False
    for i in x:
        y = y.replace(i,'',1)
    return not len(y) > 0

PS: there’s a cool method for solving this for a fixed alphabet, using primes

[More programming riddles]