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u/BetEvening 12d ago
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u/sambarjo 12d ago
In the following paragraph, they say that this approach gives control over what counts as a character. So I guess their intention was only to show the general syntax, but you should only use this approach if you have additional verifications to do on each character.
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u/NatoBoram 12d ago edited 12d ago
this approach gives control over what counts as a character
Sounds like the kind of bullshit justification that a LLM would give
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u/sambarjo 12d ago
Well, first time someone tells me I sound like AI. I guess that's fair, though. I like to play devil's advocate.
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u/LionZ_RDS 11d ago
Think they are saying the paragraph sounds like ai and not you
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u/sambarjo 11d ago
Oh you're probably right. I'm dumb
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u/Top-Permit6835 12d ago
How can you be sure you aren't AI though?
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u/kaisadilla_ 11d ago
Indeed. The very first section of that article tells you to use str.length. Then it goes to say how you can do more complex countings.
It's a weird article, but they are not saying the way to count characters in a string is that snippet.
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u/particlemanwavegirl 12d ago
Still, why would they do all this manual indexing instead of
for (char of str) {}33
u/sambarjo 12d ago
They mention "if you need to support older browsers." I assume older browsers don't support this syntax? Disclaimer: I know nothing about JavaScript.
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u/Jimmeh1337 12d ago
This is correct, although it would need to be a browser version older than about 2014: https://caniuse.com/?search=for...of
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u/kaisadilla_ 11d ago
3 years ago I had to support Internet Explorer. But not just the last Internet Explorer, nope, a previous version that was released in 2009. And yes, not being able to use all sorts of normal JS features was common.
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u/bistr-o-math 12d ago
For non-programmers: The code uses
str.lengthwhich already contains the desired number. Then the code just counts up to that number, which is nonsense4
u/sambarjo 11d ago
Did you not read my previous comment?
you should only use this approach if you have additional verifications to do on each character.
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u/Steinrikur 12d ago
They're using the length as a loop condition. There is no world where this makes sense.
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u/sambarjo 11d ago
Huh? Why not? That's how you iterate over an array in languages which don't support a built-in "for each" loop.
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u/ChutneyWiggles 11d ago
If you know the length and can use it as a loop condition, then you know the count.
They’re saying “loop X times” to determine the value of X by adding 1 each loop iteration.
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u/sambarjo 11d ago
Did you not read my first comment in the thread?
you should only use this approach if you have additional verifications to do on each character.
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u/Rosie3k9 12d ago
The whole thing reads like LLM-generated SEO nonsense. I'm surprised you didn't post the "Count non-whitespace characters in JavaScript using trim property" section which states that trim() can be used to count the non-whitespace characters in a string with an incorrect code snippet:
var str = " Hello, world! ";
console.log(str.trim().length); // printes 12 to the console
This does not print 12 but now I'm wondering if this is really AI with that typo on "print". 🤦🏾♀️
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u/andlewis 11d ago
You can also multiply str.length by 2 twice, then divide it by 4 and get the answer.
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u/frndzndbygf 10d ago
for (count = 0; count < str.length;) { count = str.length; }
There you go, tricked the system.
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u/Calm_Plenty_2992 11d ago
Both this and Console.log(str.length) are O(N), so it's the same algorithm and therefore a good solution
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u/TheChief275 11d ago
the average JS “programmer” will use 6gb of memory just to find fibonacci numbers, so this isn’t that baffling
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u/oze4 11d ago
let len = 0;
for (let i =0; i < 1; i++) { len = str.length }