Weekly Coding Challenge: Your order, please – written in JavaScript

2 min read ~ Hello readers! It’s really important for me to continue my practice and learning. Every week, I block off 30 minutes, set a timer and choose a challenge from codewars. This helps me keep my skills sharp, see how other devs all over the planet would solve these problems, and take some leisure time to problem solve and be creative. Being able to see other solutions expands my mind for solving future problems in a clever and efficient way. Today, the problem set focuses on JavaScript.

Your Order, please

Your task is to sort a given string. Each word in the string will contain a single number. This number is the position the word should have in the result.

Note: Numbers can be from 1 to 9. So 1 will be the first word (not 0).

If the input string is empty, return an empty string. The words in the input String will only contain valid consecutive numbers.

Examples:

"is2 Thi1s T4est 3a"  -->  "Thi1s is2 3a T4est"
"4of Fo1r pe6ople g3ood th5e the2"  -->  "Fo1r the2 g3ood 4of th5e pe6ople"
""  -->  ""

Solution:

function order(words){
  if (words) {
    let finalArr = []
    words.split(' ').forEach(word => {
      let index = Number(word.match(/\d+/g));
      finalArr[index - 1] = word
    })
    return finalArr.join(' ')
  }
  return words;
}

Disclaimer: *Now, as much as I am tempted to use ES8 & ES9 functions to reduce the number of lines in JavaScript, I am always a fan of readable code that others can understand. Therefore, with the JavaScript examples, I will try to write it without fancy functions as much as possible so it can actually be read and absorbed by my readers. All of my solutions are commented to explain my thinking. Of course, they could always be better. Please feel free to share how you would solve it!*

All solutions are also now on my GitHub profile if you want to check out all of the coding challenges I’ve completed so far!

All credit to problem sets goes to codewars