I am returning null with this code, however I cannot see why/where this is going wrong. (It may be due to the sort function since I got this from a well upvoted snippet on how to sort an array). I care more about the understanding than the correct answer.
Task I am trying to achieve :
Ratiorg got statues of different sizes as a present from CodeMaster for his birthday, each statue having an non-negative integer size. Since he likes to make things perfect, he wants to arrange them from smallest to largest so that each statue will be bigger than the previous one exactly by 1. He may need some additional statues to be able to accomplish that. Help him figure out the minimum number of additional statues needed.
Example
For
statues = [6, 2, 3, 8], the output should besolution(statues) = 3.Ratiorg needs statues of sizes 4, 5 and 7.
My code & thinking:
function solution(statues) {
let total = 0;
statues.sort(function(a, b) { //From what I understand this should sort the array numerically
return a - b;
});
for (let i = 1; i < statues.length; i++) { //iterate through the array comparing the index to the one before it
if (statues[i + 1] != (statues[i] + 1)) { //if there is a diff between index of more than 1 it will add the diff
total += statues[i + 1] - statues[i]; //to the total variable
}
}
return total;
}
const result = solution([6, 2, 3, 8]);
console.log(result);Thanks to people who commented who helped me see that there were some errors in my logic - I have now changed the if statement to compare an index starting at 1 to the behind it i.e index 1 compared to index 0. On top of that, there was an issue with the following line total += statues[i] - statues[i-1];
I replaced that with a for loop so that it counts up to the number rather than a simple subtraction of it.
function solution(statues) {
//[6, 2, 3, 8] --- 2,3,6,8 --- 3,6 7-2,
let total = 0;
statues.sort(function(a, b) {
return a - b;
});
for(let i =1; i<statues.length; i++){
if(statues[i] != (statues[i-1]+1) ){
//total += statues[i] - statues[i-1];
for(let j = statues[i-1]; j<statues[i]-1; j++){
total += 1;
}
}
}
return total;
}