Compare two strings using javascript (nodejs) get uncommon characters count

Hafiz Hussain
2 min readJun 1, 2022

Sample input

string1 = “Joe”

string2 = “John”

Expected output is 3

Explanation of the output

From string1 = 1 letter, “e” is uncommon and from string2 = 2 letters “ h and n” are uncommon characters with the other string.

The solution looks obvious, but I didn’t find any straight forward method on internet to do so. I found some solution on geeksforgeeks website, but it was for c++.

So I thought to write the algorithm on javascript, hope it is helpful to some.

let the code begin

let a = ‘joe’, b = ‘john’; // giving two different string

// This function will generate an object that has number of occurrences of each letter for a given word

function getAlphabetsCount(arr) {
return arr.split(‘’).reduce((x, y) => {
x[y] = x[y] ? x[y] : 0;
x[y] += 1;

return x;

}, {})
}

I will call the above method with both the strings.

The first string will give the result as {‘j’ : 1, ‘o’:1, ‘e’:1}

The second string will give the result as {‘j’ : 1, ‘o’:1, ‘h’:1, ’n’ : 1}

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