Today we’re going to work on freeCodeCamp‘s Basic Algorithm Scripting challenge – ‘Slasher Flick’. This will be a pretty short post as we’re really not going to cover anything new, I just wanted to go through this algorithm to show how short and concise a solution to a problem can be.
The ‘Slasher Flick’ challenge is to ‘return the remaining elements of an array after chopping off n elements from the head’.
This is the starting point FCC gives us:
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function slasher(arr, howMany) { // it doesn't always pay to be first return arr; } |
As you can see, we need to write the body of the function ‘slasher’, which accepts an array ‘arr’ and a number ‘howMany’. slasher should then return ‘arr’ with ‘howMany’ elements removed from the head, or beginning, of the array.
We can actually accomplish this challenge with just 1 line of code. To do so, we’ll use the array.slice() method, which we first used in the ‘Title Case a Sentence’.
If you remember from that previous post, array.slice() is a method that returns a new array (which is what we need this function to return). It takes 2 arguments. The 1st argument is the index of where the returned array will begin, which is conveniently given to us as the argument ‘howMany’. The 2nd argument for array.slice() is the index of the final element to include in the returned array, and is optional. Since we’ll be returning the entire array after cutting off ‘howMany’ elements, we’ll only use 1 argument. If you wanted to include ‘arr.length’ as the second argument to make it more clear, that would work too.
Now, given we have everything we need to return the wanted array, here’s the solution:
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function slasher(arr, howMany) { return arr.slice(howMany); } |
This function now returns the given array with ‘howMany’ elements removed from the head.
Obviously this algorithm is pretty simple, it’s part of the ‘Basic Algorithm Scripting’ after all, but I wanted to cover it to show that sometimes the solution can be pretty straightforward and simple… No need to overthink it.
Hopefully this helped straighten out the code for you.
-Jeremy