Return the first word with the greatest number of repeated letters

Question

This is a question from coderbyte’s easy set. Many people asked about it already, but I’m really curious about what’s wrong with my particular solution (I know it’s a pretty

Answer 1

You need to move the return word; statement outside of the loop to fix your version.

I also put together another take on the algorithm that relies on a few built in javascript methods like Array.map and Math.max, just for reference. I ran a few tests and it seems to be a few milliseconds faster, but not by much.

function LetterCountI(str) {
    var maxCount = 0;
    var word = '-1';

    //split string into words based on spaces and count repeated characters
    str.toLowerCase().split(" ").forEach(function(currentWord){
        var hash = {};

        //split word into characters and increment a hash map for repeated values
        currentWord.split('').forEach(function(letter){
            if (hash.hasOwnProperty(letter)) {
                hash[letter]++;
            } else {
                hash[letter] = 1;
            }           
        });

        //covert the hash map to an array of character counts
        var characterCounts = Object.keys(hash).map(function(key){ return hash[key]; });

        //find the maximum value in the squashed array
        var currentMaxRepeatedCount = Math.max.apply(null, characterCounts);

        //if the current word has a higher repeat count than previous max, replace it
        if (currentMaxRepeatedCount > maxCount) {
            maxCount = currentMaxRepeatedCount;
            word = currentWord;
        }
    });

    return word;
}