Diff Two Arrays - Help me understand why my code works

1

Hello All,

I knew that I wanted to .concat() the two arrays and remove any duplicates. So I ended up achieving that but now I have no idea why its working… At first I thought it was a glitch but then I ran it through brackets and it worked fine in there too. I think the finalArr array should have more variables than the two it has, but please help me understand this:

function diffArray(arr1, arr2) {
var newArr = [];
var finalArr = [];
newArr = arr1.concat(arr2);
newArr.sort();

for(var i = 0; i < newArr.length; i++){
if(newArr[i] === newArr[i+1]) {
newArr.shift(newArr[i]);
} else {
finalArr.push(newArr[i]);
}

}

return finalArr;
}

diffArray([“andesite”, “grass”, “dirt”, “pink wool”, “dead shrub”], [“diorite”, “andesite”, “grass”, “dirt”, “dead shrub”]);

Thank you guys!

2

What do you think happens here:

newArr.shift(newArr[i]);

and here:

i < newArr.length
3

Oh wow thank you for pointing that out! So essentially ‘i’ continues to rise as the array.length shifts down, meaning what used to be arr[1] becomes arr[0] after the original arr[0] gets shifted?

4

Yes.
And btw, .shift() doesn’t take parameters, it just removes first item from an array. So when you find two equal items, first item from the array gets removed, i now points to the next item, for loop continues, i gets incremented and now points to the next next item.

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