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Ganesh Shetty
Ganesh Shetty

Posted on • Updated on

Grouping Anagram in Javascript

An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once,

These are the examples

car = arc   arc = car   brag = grab
bored = robed   cat = act   cider = cried
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In the first example we have eat = tea , here tea can be formed by eat by rearranging,

So now the task is not to find anagram but grouping them together from a list of elements.

for example, if we are given this array which contains anagram

["dusty", "night",'tea', "robed","ate","study","thing","eat"]

Then after grouping it should be something like below

[
 ['dusty', 'study'],
 ['night', 'thing'],
 ['tea', 'ate', 'eat'],
 ['robed']
] 
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So the idea is very simple,We keep an object and we sort each element and add as a key and value will be same as incoming element(without sorting),so if the sorted element is already present as key then we just push the element to existing array of elements

So the object looks like below,
[Image description]

here is the code for the same

<script>
    function groupAnagrams(array) {
       let reducedObject = array.reduce((acc, cur) => {
          let newcur=cur.split('').sort().join('');
          if (!acc[newcur]) {
             acc[newcur] = [cur]
          } else {
             acc[newcur] = [...acc[newcur], cur]
          }
          return acc;
       }, {});
       return Object.values(reducedObject);
    }
    console.log(groupAnagrams(["dusty", "night",'tea', "robed","ate","study","thing","eat"]));
 </script>
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