Programming Brain Teaser

By jeroensmeets | Published: July 8, 2008

Dustin Diaz told a programmer’s riddle — impossible to leave these things alone. So I wrote a solution. One thing bugs me: the itch that this could be done much, much easier.

var arr = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'c', 'd','e', 'e',
              'e', 'e', 'e', 'f', 'e', 'f', 'e',
              'f', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'f', 'f', 'f'];
var bingo = false;
// first two are never in a span
var result = arr[0] + ' ' + arr[1];
// old fashioned for to start at 3rd element
for (var i = 2; i &lt; arr.length; i++) {
  // is this the third in a row?
  if ((arr[i] == arr[i-1]) &amp;&amp; (arr[i] == arr[i-2])) {
    // start bookending them if that hasn't already been done
    if (!bingo) {
      result += ' &lt;span>';
      bingo = true;
    }
  } else {
    if (bingo) {
      result += '&lt;/span>';
      bingo = false;
    }
  }
  result += ' ' + arr[i];
}
 
// close last one?
if (bingo) {
  result += '&lt;/span>';
}
 
// remove space after opening span tag
result = result.replace(/&lt;span> /g, '&lt;span>');
alert(result);

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Programming Brain Teaser

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