How to solve the Sherlock and Anagrams coding challenge in JavaScript

This post is going to get you through my solution of a coding challenge called "Sherlock and Anagrams". You may take a look at it in HackerRank. I spent a lot of time trying to solve it, with JavaScript. When I tried to google it, I could not find a decent JS solution. I found just one and it was not working correctly. Also any explanations were completely out of the question. That's why I decided to write an article about it and try to put some nice and easy to digest explanations along the way. Keep reading now!

⚠ CAUTION: I will roll out my solution below with short explanations about each of the steps. If you want to give a try yourself, please stop here and go to HackerRank site.

Problem

Two strings are anagrams of each other if the letters of one string can be rearranged to form the other string. Given a string, find the number of pairs of substrings of the string that are anagrams of each other.

For example s = mom, the list of all anagrammatic pairs is [m, m], [mo, om] at positions [[0], [2]], [[0, 1], [1, 2]] respectively.

Constraints

Length of the input string: 2 ≤ |s| ≤ 100

String s contains only lowercase letters from the range ascii[a-z].

Analysis

First thing first - we need to get a better understanding of the whole problem. What is an anagram? What is an anagrammatic pair? Can I see one? Also, what exactly does it mean substrings?

In other words, we need to have a clear picture of what are we trying to solve, before solving it.
From the description of the problem we can deduct all we need. Keep walking! 🚶

I think here is a good moment to mention that the challenge in question is under "Dictionaries and Hashmaps" section in HackerRank website, so it's very likely for one to think, that probably he has to use this kind of data structures when solving it. 😇

Anagrams

Since we are going to look for anagrams, let's start with them. As it is described above, an anagram of one word is another word, that has the same length and is created with the same characters from the former one.

So we will have to look for words and compare them with other words, in order to see if they are anagrammatic pairs. Once found, we will just count them.

Anagrammatic pairs

After we saw what an anagram is, it should be relatively easy to conclude, that anagrammatic pair is just two strings that are anagrams. Such as "mo" and "om", or "listen" and "silent". We will have to count how many pairs like this could be found in a given string. In order to do that, we need to split this original string to substrings.

Substrings

Substrings, as the name infer, are parts of a string. These parts could be just a letter or a pair of letters, such as what have we seen in the example above - "m" or "mo". In our solution we will split the original string to such substrings and then we will go over them and do the comparison, which will tell us whether we have anagrammatic pairs among them.

Solution

Now, when we did our analysis, it's showtime! 🎆

Let's summarize:

We need to find all substrings of the given string - create a method for that.
We need to be able to check if two strings are anagrams - create a method for that.
We need to count all anagrammatic pairs in the given string - create a method for that.
Combine everything from above and spit the result - create a method for that.

Get all substrings

This would be our helper method for finding all substring of a given string:

function getAllSubstrings(str) {
  let i, j, result = [];

  for (i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    for (j = i + 1; j < str.length + 1; j++) {
      result.push(str.slice(i, j))
    }
  }
  return result
}

As you can see, it has O(n^2) time complexity, but for our case it does the job, because we have limited length of the input string (up to 100 characters).

Check for anagrams

This would be our helper method for checking if two strings are anagrammatic pair:

function isAnagram(str1, str2) {
  const hist = {}

  for (let i = 0; i < str1.length; i++) {
    const char = str1[i]
    if (hist[char]) {
      hist[char]++
    } else {
      hist[char] = 1
    }
  }

  for (let j = 0; j < str2.length; j++) {
    const char = str2[j]
    if (hist[char]) {
      hist[char]--
    } else {
      return false
    }
  }

  return true
}

❕ You remember, judging by the section where this challenge belongs, we assumed that most probably we will have to use data structures such as hashmaps or dictionaries. Here is the moment to notice that. We use a simple JavaScript object to play the role of a hashmap. We do two iterations - one per string. When we iterate over the first one, we add its characters as keys to the hashmap and count their appearances, which are going to be stored as their values. Then we do another iteration over the second string. Check if its characters are stored in our hashmap. If yes - decrement their value. If there are missing characters, which means the two strings are not anagrammatic pair, we simply return false. If both loops complete, we return true, signifying that the strings being analysed are anagrammatic pair.

Do the counting

This is the method, where we will use the helper for checking if a pair is anagrammatic and count it. We do that with the help of JavaScript arrays and the methods they provide. We iterate over an array containing all the substrings of the original string. Then we get the currect element and remove it from the array. And then we do another loop through that array and return 1 if we find that there is an anagram of the current element. If nothing is found, we return 0.

function countAnagrams(currentIndex, arr) {
  const currentElement = arr[currentIndex]
  const arrRest = arr.slice(currentIndex + 1)
  let counter = 0

  for (let i = 0; i < arrRest.length; i++) {
    if (currentElement.length === arrRest[i].length && isAnagram(currentElement, arrRest[i])) {
      counter++
    }
  }

 return counter
}

And in the end

The only thing left to be done now is to combine all of the above and spit the desired result. Here is how the final method looks like:

function sherlockAndAnagrams(s) {
  const duplicatesCount = s.split('').filter((v, i) => s.indexOf(v) !== i).length

  if (!duplicatesCount) return 0
  let anagramsCount = 0

  const arr = getAllSubstrings(s)

  for (let i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
    anagramsCount += countAnagrams(i, arr)
  }

  return anagramsCount
}

Maybe you have noticed, here I am checking first for duplicates, in order to know if I should continue further. As if there are no duplicated letters, then it's not possible to have an anagram.

And finally, we get all substrings into an array, iterate over it, count the anagrammatic pairs that are found and return this number. You can find the full code here.

Conclusion

This kind of exercises are very good for making you think algorithmically, but also they change your way of working in your day to day job. My recommendation would be to do the same I am trying to do - train your brain now and then with one of those. And if you can - share. I know sometimes you don't have time for such challenges, but when you do - go for it.

My personal feeling after finishing this was a total satisfaction, which is completely understandable, considering the the time it took me to do it. But at the end, dear reader, I am even happier I can share this experience with you 😌!

JavaScript Tutorial: if-else Statement in JavaScript

This JavaScript tutorial is a step by step guide on JavaScript If Else Statements. Learn how to use If Else in javascript and also JavaScript If Else Statements. if-else Statement in JavaScript. JavaScript's conditional statements: if; if-else; nested-if; if-else-if. These statements allow you to control the flow of your program's execution based upon conditions known only during run time.

Decision Making in programming is similar to decision making in real life. In programming also we face some situations where we want a certain block of code to be executed when some condition is fulfilled.
A programming language uses control statements to control the flow of execution of the program based on certain conditions. These are used to cause the flow of execution to advance and branch based on changes to the state of a program.

JavaScript’s conditional statements:

if
if-else
nested-if
if-else-if

These statements allow you to control the flow of your program’s execution based upon conditions known only during run time.

if: if statement is the most simple decision making statement. It is used to decide whether a certain statement or block of statements will be executed or not i.e if a certain condition is true then a block of statement is executed otherwise not.
Syntax:

if(condition) 
{
   // Statements to execute if
   // condition is true
}

Here, condition after evaluation will be either true or false. if statement accepts boolean values – if the value is true then it will execute the block of statements under it.
If we do not provide the curly braces ‘{‘ and ‘}’ after if( condition ) then by default if statement will consider the immediate one statement to be inside its block. For example,

if(condition)
   statement1;
   statement2;

// Here if the condition is true, if block 
// will consider only statement1 to be inside 
// its block.

Flow chart:

Example:

<script type = "text/javaScript"> 

// JavaScript program to illustrate If statement 

var i = 10; 

if (i > 15) 
document.write("10 is less than 15"); 

// This statement will be executed 
// as if considers one statement by default 
document.write("I am Not in if"); 

< /script>

Output:

I am Not in if

if-else: The if statement alone tells us that if a condition is true it will execute a block of statements and if the condition is false it won’t. But what if we want to do something else if the condition is false. Here comes the else statement. We can use the else statement with if statement to execute a block of code when the condition is false.
Syntax:

if (condition)
{
    // Executes this block if
    // condition is true
}
else
{
    // Executes this block if
    // condition is false
}

Example:

<script type = "text/javaScript"> 

// JavaScript program to illustrate If-else statement 

var i = 10; 

if (i < 15) 
document.write("10 is less than 15"); 
else
document.write("I am Not in if"); 

< /script>

Output:

i is smaller than 15

nested-if A nested if is an if statement that is the target of another if or else. Nested if statements means an if statement inside an if statement. Yes, JavaScript allows us to nest if statements within if statements. i.e, we can place an if statement inside another if statement.
Syntax:

if (condition1) 
{
   // Executes when condition1 is true
   if (condition2) 
   {
      // Executes when condition2 is true
   }
}

Example:

<script type = "text/javaScript"> 

// JavaScript program to illustrate nested-if statement 

var i = 10; 

if (i == 10) { 

// First if statement 
if (i < 15) 
	document.write("i is smaller than 15"); 

// Nested - if statement 
// Will only be executed if statement above 
// it is true 
if (i < 12) 
	document.write("i is smaller than 12 too"); 
else
	document.write("i is greater than 15"); 
} 
< /script>

Output:

i is smaller than 15
i is smaller than 12 too

if-else-if ladder Here, a user can decide among multiple options.The if statements are executed from the top down. As soon as one of the conditions controlling the if is true, the statement associated with that if is executed, and the rest of the ladder is bypassed. If none of the conditions is true, then the final else statement will be executed.

if (condition)
    statement;
else if (condition)
    statement;
.
.
else
    statement;

Example:

<script type = "text/javaScript"> 
// JavaScript program to illustrate nested-if statement 

var i = 20; 

if (i == 10) 
document.wrte("i is 10"); 
else if (i == 15) 
document.wrte("i is 15"); 
else if (i == 20) 
document.wrte("i is 20"); 
else
document.wrte("i is not present"); 
< /script>

Output:

i is 20

How to Retrieve full Profile of LinkedIn User using Javascript

I am trying to retrieve the full profile (especially job history and educational qualifications) of a linkedin user via the Javascript (Fetch LinkedIn Data Using JavaScript)

Here we are fetching LinkedIn data like Username, Email and other fields using JavaScript SDK.

Here we have 2 workarounds.

Configuration of linkedIn developer api
Javascript Code to fetch records

Configuration of linkedIn developer api

In order to fetch records, first we need to create developer api in linkedin which will act as token/identity while fetching data from other linkedin accounts.

So to create api, navigate to https://linkedin.com/developer/apps and click on 'Create Application'.

After navigating, fill in details like name, description and other required fields and then submit.

As we submit, it will create Client ID and Client Secret shown below, which we will be using in our code while communicating to fetch records from other LinkedIn account.

Note: We need to provide localhost Url here under Oauth 2.0. I am using my localhost, but you can probably use other production URLs under Oauth 2.0 where your app is configured. It will make your api consider the Url as trusted which fetching records.

Javascript Code to fetch records

For getting user details like first name, last name,User image can be written as,

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://platform.linkedin.com/in.js">  
    api_key: XXXXXXX //Client ID  
    onLoad: OnLinkedInFrameworkLoad //Method that will be called on page load  
    authorize: true  
</script>  
<script type="text/javascript">  
    function OnLinkedInFrameworkLoad() {  
        IN.Event.on(IN, "auth", OnLinkedInAuth);  
    }  
  
    function OnLinkedInAuth() {  
        IN.API.Profile("me").result(ShowProfileData);  
    }  
  
    function ShowProfileData(profiles) {  
        var member = profiles.values[0];  
        var id = member.id;  
        var firstName = member.firstName;  
        var lastName = member.lastName;  
        var photo = member.pictureUrl;  
        var headline = member.headline;  
        //use information captured above  
        var stringToBind = "<p>First Name: " + firstName + " <p/><p> Last Name: " + lastName + "<p/><p>User ID: " + id + " and Head Line Provided: " + headline + "<p/>"  
        document.getElementById('profiles').innerHTML = stringToBind;  
    }  
</script>

Kindly note we need to include 'https://platform.linkedin.com/in.js' as src under script type as it will act on this Javascript SDK provided by Linkedin.

In the same way we can also fetch records of any organization with the companyid as keyword.

<head>  
    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://platform.linkedin.com/in.js">  
        api_key: XXXXXXX ////Client ID  
        onLoad: onLinkedInLoad  
        authorize: true  
    </script>  
</head>  
  
<body>  
    <div id="displayUpdates"></div>  
    <script type="text/javascript">  
        function onLinkedInLoad() {  
            IN.Event.on(IN, "auth", onLinkedInAuth);  
            console.log("On auth");  
        }  
  
        function onLinkedInAuth() {  
            var cpnyID = XXXXX; //the Company ID for which we want updates  
            IN.API.Raw("/companies/" + cpnyID + "/updates?event-type=status-update&start=0&count=10&format=json").result(displayCompanyUpdates);  
            console.log("After auth");  
        }  
  
        function displayCompanyUpdates(result) {  
            var div = document.getElementById("displayUpdates");  
            var el = "<ul>";  
            var resValues = result.values;  
            for (var i in resValues) {  
                var share = resValues[i].updateContent.companyStatusUpdate.share;  
                var isContent = share.content;  
                var isTitled = isContent,  
                    isLinked = isContent,  
                    isDescription = isContent,  
                    isThumbnail = isContent,  
                    isComment = isContent;  
                if (isTitled) {  
                    var title = isContent.title;  
                } else {  
                    var title = "News headline";  
                }  
                var comment = share.comment;  
                if (isLinked) {  
                    var link = isContent.shortenedUrl;  
                } else {  
                    var link = "#";  
                }  
                if (isDescription) {  
                    var description = isContent.description;  
                } else {  
                    var description = "No description";  
                }  
                /* 
                if (isThumbnailz) { 
                var thumbnailUrl = isContent.thumbnailUrl; 
                } else { 
                var thumbnailUrl = "http://placehold.it/60x60"; 
                } 
                */  
                if (share) {  
                    var content = "<a target='_blank' href=" + link + ">" + comment + "</a><br>";  
                    //el += "<li><img src='" + thumbnailUrl + "' alt=''>" + content + "</li>";  
                    el += "<li><div>" + content + "</div></li>";  
                }  
                console.log(share);  
            }  
            el += "</ul>";  
            document.getElementById("displayUpdates").innerHTML = el;  
        }  
    </script>  
</body>

We can get multiple metadata while fetching records for any any organization. We can get company updates as shown below.

Conclusion

We can also fetch any company specific data like company job updates/post, total likes, comments, and number of views along with a lot of metadata we can fetch which I have shown below.

Thank you for reading !

7 Best Javascript Iframe Libraries

Iframes let you build user experiences into embeddable ‘cross-domain components’, which let users interact with other sites without being redirected. I have compiled 7 best Javascript iframe libraries.

1. Zoid

A cross-domain component toolkit, supporting:

Render an iframe or popup on a different domain, and pass down props, including objects and functions
Call callbacks natively from the child window without worrying about post-messaging or cross-domain restrictions
Create and expose components to share functionality from your site to others!
Render your component directly as a React, Vue or Angular component!
It's 'data-down, actions up' style components, but 100% cross-domain using iframes and popups!

Download

2. Postmate

Postmate is a promise-based API built on postMessage. It allows a parent page to speak with a child iFrame across origins with minimal effort.

Download

3. Iframe Resizer

Keep same and cross domain iFrames sized to their content with support for window/content resizing, in page links, nesting and multiple iFrames

Demo

Download

4. Iframely

Embed proxy. Supports over 1800 domains via custom parsers, oEmbed, Twitter Cards and Open Graph

Demo

Download

5. React Frame component

This component allows you to encapsulate your entire React application or per component in an iFrame.

Demo

Download

6. Seamless.js

A seamless iframe makes it so that visitors are unable to distinguish between content within the iframe and content beside the iframe. Seamless.js is a JavaScript library (with no dependencies) that makes working with iframes easy by doing all the seamless stuff for you automatically.

Demo

Download

7. Porthole

A proxy to safely communicate to cross-domain iframes in javascript

Demo

Download

Thank for read!