CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Colonel Panic
Colonel Panic

Reputation: 137622

How to generate easy anagrams preserving punctuation?

I'm writing the hint system for a quiz. The hints are to be anagrams of the answers. To make the anagrams easier, I keep the first and last letters the same.

var _ = require('underscore');

var easy = function(s) {
    if (s.length <= 1) {
        return s;
    }
    return s[0] + _.shuffle(s.slice(1, -1)).join("") + s.slice(-1);
};

For multiple word answers, I want to anagram each word separately. I wrote:

var peasy = function(s) {
    return s.split(/\W/).map(easy).join(" ");
}

However this loses any punctuation in the answer (replacing it with a space). I'd like to keep the punctuation in its original position. How can I do that?

Here are three examples to test on:

console.log(peasy("mashed potatoes"));
console.log(peasy("computer-aided design"));
console.log(peasy("sophie's choice"));

My function peasy above fails the second and third examples because it loses hyphen and apostrophe.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 173

Answers (2)

Casimir et Hippolyte
Casimir et Hippolyte

Reputation: 89565

It's more simple to use String.prototype.replace instead of splitting:

  • you don't need to slice after the first and before the last letter.
  • the replacement occurs only on word characters (other characters stay untouched)
  • words with less than 4 characters are skipped.
  • it's shorter and doesn't need the easy function.
var _ = require('underscore');

var peasy = function(s) {
    return s.replace(/\B\w{2,}\B/g, function (m) {
        return _.shuffle(m).join('');
    });
}

Upvotes: 2

ericbn
ericbn

Reputation: 10968

Splitting by word separator does the trick:

var peasy = function(s) {
    return s.split(/\b/).map(easy).join("");
}

Explanation: "computer-aided design".split(/\b/) results in ["computer", "-", "aided", " ", "design"]. Then you shuffle each element with easy and join them, getting something like "ctemopur-adeid diegsn" back...

Upvotes: 3

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