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

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 />");
}