Counting the occurrences / frequency of array elements

Question

In Javascript, I\'m trying to take an initial array of number values and count the elements inside it. Ideally, the result would be two new arrays, the first specifying each

Answer 1

You can simplify this a bit by extending your arrays with a count function. It works similar to Ruby’s Array#count, if you’re familiar with it.

Array.prototype.count = function(obj){
  var count = this.length;
  if(typeof(obj) !== "undefined"){
    var array = this.slice(0), count = 0; // clone array and reset count
    for(i = 0; i < array.length; i++){
      if(array[i] == obj){ count++ }
    }
  }
  return count;
}

Usage:

let array = ['a', 'b', 'd', 'a', 'c'];
array.count('a'); // => 2
array.count('b'); // => 1
array.count('e'); // => 0
array.count(); // => 5

Gist

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Edit

You can then get your first array, with each occurred item, using Array#filter:

let occurred = [];
array.filter(function(item) {
  if (!occurred.includes(item)) {
    occurred.push(item);
    return true;
  }
}); // => ["a", "b", "d", "c"]

And your second array, with the number of occurrences, using Array#count into Array#map:

occurred.map(array.count.bind(array)); // => [2, 1, 1, 1]

Alternatively, if order is irrelevant, you can just return it as a key-value pair:

let occurrences = {}
occurred.forEach(function(item) { occurrences[item] = array.count(item) });
occurences; // => {2: 5, 4: 1, 5: 3, 9: 1}