Pig Latin
From the FreeCodeCamp Intermediate Algorithms Challenges, here:
Translate the provided string to pig latin.
Pig Latin takes the first consonant (or consonant cluster) of an English word, moves it to the end of the word and suffixes an “ay”. If a word begins with a vowel you just add “way” to the end. If a word does not contain a vowel, just add “ay” to the end. Input strings are guaranteed to be English words in all lowercase.
FreeCodeCamp – Pig Latin
When first approaching this problem I thought it may involve regex – but I was concerned that it might have been quite complex, and perhaps I’d need to spend some time learning more complex regex patterns.
However, I was surprised to find that I really only needed a consonant regex, and a vowel regex. Some quick searching also let me know that I could use {1,}
to get the regex to check for one or more of each consonant or vowel, which is helpful.
Initially I tackled the word beginning with a vowel – I recalled that the .search()
method would be useful as it returns the index of first occurrence of the tested regex. So as long as that equaled zero, the word must begin with a vowel. That would mean that all I’d need to do is concatenate the given string and ‘way’.
Then to tackle the word beginning with one or more consonants, I thought I could actually do something quite similar. My consonant regex will already be checking for one or more so I had consonant clusters covered. Even if the regex found was more than one character the .search()
would still need to be equal to zero for the consonant/cluster to be at the start of the word.
From here all I’d need to do is create a new string which is from the old string but had the instance of the regex replaced with nothing (which is this line of code: let newStr = str.replace(regex, '');
), and then concatenate the new string, the found regex and ‘ay’, which will create the correct return string.
My solution:
function translatePigLatin(str) {
let regex = /[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz]{1,}/;
let vowelRegex = /[aeiou]{1,}/;
let found = str.match(regex);
if (str.search(vowelRegex) == 0) {
return str += 'way';
} else if (str.search(regex) == 0) {
let newStr = str.replace(regex, '');
return newStr + found + 'ay';
}
}
translatePigLatin('consonant'); // 'onsonantcay'