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Posted on Oct 22, 2020

Daily Challenge #298 - Find the Shortest Word

#challenge

Given a string of words, return the length of the shortest word in the string.

Examples

find_short("bitcoin take over the world maybe who knows perhaps"), 3)
find_short("turns out random test cases are easier than writing out basic ones"), 3)

Tests

find_short("let us talk about javascript")
find_short("i want to travel the world writing code one day")
find_short("Lets all go on holiday somewhere very cold")

Good luck!

This challenge comes from A.Partridge on CodeWars. Thank you to CodeWars, who has licensed redistribution of this challenge under the 2-Clause BSD License!

Want to propose a challenge idea for a future post? Email yo+challenge@dev.to with your suggestions!

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Top comments (8)

Alvaro Montoro • Oct 22 '20

Here is a silly answer in the same spirit as the sorting by using time outs. The idea is, instead of trying to calculate/compare sizes, setting a timeout for each word with a delay equal to its length. The timeout callback will show the result and cancel the other timeouts.

Here is the code (demo with the code running on Codepen):

function find_short(str) {
  let timers = {};

  const removeTimers = () => {
    Object.keys(timers).forEach(el => clearTimeout(timers[el]));
  }

  const setTimer = word => {
    timers[word] = setTimeout(
      function() { 
        alert(`The shortest word has ${word.length} characters`);
        removeTimers();
      }, 
      word.length
    );
  };

  str.split(" ").forEach(word => setTimer(word));
}

bugb • Oct 26 '20 • Edited

nice, you are so creative!

Lizard • Oct 22 '20

Here is an answer in python

def find_short(s: str) -> int:
    """
    Returns the length of the shortest word in the string s
    """
    lengths = map(lambda w: len(w), s.split())
    return min(lengths)

Ruud Gianesini • Oct 23 '20

Here is an answer in node (first time I write something in node :) ) :

function find_short(phrase: string) { 
 return phrase.split(' ').reduce( (p, c, i) => (i==0 || c.length < p.length) ? c : p)
}

Ilyes Chouia • Oct 24 '20 • Edited

Here's the solution in PHP

Note: works only on 7.4+

function find_short(string $str): int
{
    $str = explode(' ', $str); // you can use preg_split('/\s/', $str);
    usort($str, fn($a, $b) => strlen($a) > strlen($b));
    return strlen($str[0]);
}

peter279k • Oct 26 '20

Here is the simple solution with PHP:

function findShort($str) {
  $freqLen = [];
  $strs = explode(' ', $str);
  foreach ($strs as $str) {
    $freqLen[] = strlen($str);
  }

  return min($freqLen);
}

Amin • Oct 23 '20

Elm

import String exposing (words, length)
import List exposing (foldl)


shortestLength : String -> Length
shortestLength text =
    text
        |> words
        |> foldl (\a b -> if length a < length b then a else b) text
        |> length

bugb • Oct 26 '20 • Edited

My js solution:

find_short=s=>Math.min(...s.split` `.map(v=>v.length))|0

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