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This is incorrect, and why this is a non-trivial task.
A string represents text which is formed of graphemes, which are formed by combining character sequences in unicode.
Which means that in order to reverse a textual string properly you need to identify the graphemic units which need to be reordered, separate them, and then recombine.
Which means that you can't think of a string as being an array of characters if you want to process text properly in Javascript. :)
Interesting and accurate, arrays and strings are clearly not the same.
I think the confusion may come because both arrays and strings share some methods and properties with the same name, and we can do some "array-like" things, like:
length
concat()
str[0]
-- character position access ( though, the correct approach should bestr.charAt()
)Also, arrays are mutable and strings aren't. so we can't do this:
str[1] = 'stuff'
Also, when using the native constructor, for instance,
new String('Sup dude')
each character is numerically indexed (like arrays), but in this case, even though we're using the built-in native constructor, it is not creating a string, instead, it creates an object. So, when using the string properties - length, concat, etc - JS implicitly does this boxing for us( under the hood it uses the String() native ). So we need to do str.toString() in order to get the actual string.Those are language specific methods, in fact theoretically, strings have length while arrays have size, you can concat strings while you join arrays and string[i] breaks up on most languages for obvious reasons.
It's a comparison of whole different data structures where I don't want to involve at all (that's all already wrote about) but i feel the need to clarify this.
Thanks pentacular and Diego, these are really great points that I neglected to touch on. I'll add a bit into the tutorial and video to emphasize the distinctions.
You're welcome. :)
You did a great job Jake, we're all in this endless learning process! So keep up the good work man! :-)
Appreciate the kind words!
This is something I knew intuitively, but never thought of explicitly. Are there any resources you recommend that covers tips, tricks, gotchas for text processing in JS?
Begin with JS data structures, then search for string related API on JavaScript. Note that JavaScript lacks static typing so sometimes you can call a method that deals with strings on a non-string data type (same with other data types and language pre-defined methods). At this point you don't know what it does in background for example when performing string split, but you can also dig deeper if you want.
Yes, absolutely!
str.split('').reverse()
BTW, this doesn't work for surrogate pairs:
It's better to use spread syntax:
Does it always work correctly? I mean
Normally, I would rather trust this library -- npmjs.com/package/runes2
good
python
string.split().reverse().join()
Never reinvent the wheel :)
Ruby -> "string".reverse stonks
Lol Ruby does some things so much simpler. Still itβs great to be able to do something manually!
Plenty of ways to reverse a string thats a lot of wheels. π
This is the kind of thought process I absolutely need to improve. βHow can I optimize this procedure?β I need to better understand data structures to improve time/space complexity. Great read!!