I want to be able to implement a Set in javascript that allows me to do something like this:
const s = Set([[1,2,3], [1,2,3], 1, 2, 1]);
s.add([1,2,3]);
console.log(s);
// {[1,2,3], 1, 2}
Of course, since the === operator is used on the set, any object will not equal itself unless a reference to the same object is passed, and so instead of the above we would currently get:
Set(5) { [ 1, 2, 3 ], [ 1, 2, 3 ], 1, 2, [ 1, 2, 3 ] }
Does the following seem like a good way to implement this? What might I be missing or can improve on?
class MySet extends Set {
constructor(...args) {
super();
for (const elem of args) {
if (!this.has(elem)) super.add(elem);
}
}
has(elem) {
if (typeof elem !== 'object') return super.has(elem);
for (const member of this) {
if (typeof member !== 'object') continue;
if (JSON.stringify(member) === JSON.stringify(elem))
return true;
}
return false;
}
add(elem) {
return (this.has(elem)) ? this : super.add(elem);
}
delete(elem) {
if (typeof elem !== 'object') return super.delete(elem);
for (const member of this) {
if (typeof member !== 'object') continue;
if (JSON.stringify(member) === JSON.stringify(elem))
return super.delete(member);
}
return false;
}
}Assuming the provided objects don't contain values that cannot be stringified to JSON (function, undefined, symbol, etc.) You can use JSON.stringify().
One problem you might encounter is that stringifying { a: 1, b: 2 } doesn't produce the same result as { b: 2, a: 1 }. A fairly easy way to solve this would be to stringify the object and make sure the resulting JSON has properties placed in alphabetical order.
For this we can look to the answer provided in sort object properties and JSON.stringify.
I also think you are over complicating things by only stringifying values if they are an object. Instead you could just stringfy everything, null would result in "null", "string" would result in '"string"', etc. This simplifies the code by a lot. The only restriction then becomes that all values must be a valid JSON value.
// see linked answer
function JSONstringifyOrder(obj, space)
{
const allKeys = new Set();
JSON.stringify(obj, (key, value) => (allKeys.add(key), value));
return JSON.stringify(obj, Array.from(allKeys).sort(), space);
}
class MySet extends Set {
// The constructor makes uses of add(), so we don't need
// to override the constructor.
has(item) {
return super.has(JSONstringifyOrder(item));
}
add(item) {
return super.add(JSONstringifyOrder(item));
}
delete(item) {
return super.delete(JSONstringifyOrder(item));
}
}
const set = new MySet([[1,2,3], [1,2,3], 1, 2, 1]);
set.add([1,2,3]);
set.add({ a: { s: 1, d: 2 }, f: 3 });
set.add({ f: 3, a: { d: 2, s: 1 } });
// Stack Overflow snippets cannot print Set instances to the console
console.log(Array.from(set));
// or unserialized
Array.from(set, json => JSON.parse(json)).forEach(item => console.log(item));