Program to find same words from 2 strings javascript

January 26, 2023

I was asked this question in an interview where I failed to answer.

Here’s my try:

str1 = "This is string 1";
str2 = "This is string 2";
let similarWords = [];
splittedStr1 = str1.split(" ");
splittedStr2 = str2.split(" ");
console.log(splittedStr1);
console.log(splittedStr2);
for (i = 0; i < splittedStr1.length; i++) {
  for (j = i; j < splittedStr2.length; j++) {
    if (splittedStr1[i] = splittedStr2[j]) {
      similarWords.push(splittedStr1[i]);
    }
  }
}
console.log(similarWords);

This outputs:

[
    "This",
    "is",
    "string",
    "2",
    "is",
    "string",
    "2",
    "string",
    "2",
    "2"
]

I’m wondering what did I miss?

I’ve shown what I tried above.

>Solution :

The problem with the code is that in the inner for loop, you are using the assignment operator (=) instead of the comparison operator (== or ===) when checking if splittedStr1[i] is equal to splittedStr2[j].

To do this, you should change the assignment operator to a comparison operator. And then you also need to check if the word is already added in the similarWords array before adding it again.

Try this.

let str1 = "This is string 1";
let str2 = "This is string 2";
let similarWords = [];
let splittedStr1 = str1.split(" ");
let splittedStr2 = str2.split(" ");

for (i = 0; i < splittedStr1.length; i++) {
  for (j = 0; j < splittedStr2.length; j++) {
    if (splittedStr1[i] === splittedStr2[j] && !similarWords.includes(splittedStr1[i])) {
      similarWords.push(splittedStr1[i]);
    }
  }
}
console.log(similarWords);