Build a Sentence Analyzer - Step 1

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:

My code return the correct count of vowels but not passed.

The error has been raised: Your getVowelCount function should return the correct vowel count for any sentence.

Your code so far


// User Editable Region

function getVowelCount(sentence){
  //the vowels chars
  const vowels=['a','e','i','u','o'];
  //check the input
  if(sentence === null || sentence === '')
    return -1;
  //prepare counter and change sentence to lowercase
  let count=0;
  let toLower=sentence.toLowerCase();
  //search and count
  for(let char of toLower){
    if(vowels.includes(char))
      count++;
  }
  //return the count
  return count;
}

// User Editable Region

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Challenge Information:

Build a Sentence Analyzer - Step 1

2

Hey there,
what’s the purpose of if(sentence === null || sentence === '') return -1;?
Is the if statement correct there?
Does the step ask you to do this?

3

Hi, thank you for answering my question. I removed that and passed.
but in programming, it’s a typical way to prevent errors. what’s the problem with that?

4

if the argument is '', there are -1 vowles? or zero?

5

For one, you do not use exit status codes in JavaScript. You would throw or return something more useful than a number.

It might be used in C/C++ to return an integer like 0, 1, or -1 (or whatever) in procedural functions that do side effects to indicate if it was successful or not. But if a function is expected to return a count, and 0 is a valid count to return from an empty string, then it doesn’t make sense to return -1. The function isn’t unsuccessful when it gets an empty string, it is expected to return the count, which would be 0.