Pig Latin—aargh!

JavaScript
1

Here’s a basic solution I came up with and it is supposed to checkout just fine. However, I ran the tests and the last two didn’t.

  • Should handle words where the first vowel comes in the end of the word. :x:
  • Should handle words without vowels. :x:

Please help me figure this out.

My code so far


function translatePigLatin(str) {
  let vowels = ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'];

  // Word begins with a vowel
  if (vowels.indexOf(str[0]) !== -1) {
    return str + 'way';
  } else if (vowels.indexOf(str[0]) === -1 && vowels.indexOf(str[1]) === -1) {
    // Word begins with two-letter consonant cluster
    return str.slice(2) + `${str.slice(0, 2)}ay`;
  } else if (vowels.indexOf(str[0]) === -1 && vowels.indexOf(str[1]) !== 1) {
    // Word begins with one-letter consonant cluster
    return str.slice(1) + `${str.slice(0, 1)}ay`;
  } else {
    // Word with first vowel at the end
    return str.slice(str.length - 1) + `${str.slice(0, str.length - 1)}ay`;
  }
  // Words without vowels
  return str + 'ay';
}

console.log(translatePigLatin("california")); // aliforniacay
console.log(translatePigLatin("paragraphs")); // aragraphspay
console.log(translatePigLatin("glove"));      // oveglay
console.log(translatePigLatin("consonant"));  // onsonantcay
console.log(translatePigLatin("algorithm"));  // algorithmway
console.log(translatePigLatin("eight"));      // eightway
console.log(translatePigLatin("tha"));        // athay
console.log(translatePigLatin("my"));         // myay

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0.2 Safari/605.1.15.

Link to the challenge:

2

2 things seems strange to me:

  1. I think this part will never be executed:
  } else {
    // Word with first vowel at the end
    return str.slice(str.length - 1) + `${str.slice(0, str.length - 1)}ay`;
  1. you are limited to 2 consonants
    What about eg: xyza? Shouldn’t it be axyzay ?
3

Your code works only if the first vowel is one of the first three letters, see what happens with these function calls:

let a = "ibbbbbbbbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a)); // ibbbbbbbbbway
a = "bibbbbbbbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a)); // ibbbbbbbbbay
a = "bbibbbbbbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a)); // ibbbbbbbbbay
a = "bbbibbbbbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a)); // bibbbbbbbbay
a = "bbbbibbbbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a));  // bbibbbbbbbay
a = "bbbbbibbbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a));  // bbbibbbbbbay
a = "bbbbbbibbb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a));  // bbbbibbbbbay
a = "bbbbbbbibb"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a));  // bbbbbibbbbay
a = "bbbbbbbbib"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a));  // bbbbbbibbbay
a = "bbbbbbbbbi"
console.log(translatePigLatin(a));  // bbbbbbbibbay
4

Whew! Thanks for your reviews guys… I just worked out a better solution using regex, match() and the substr() methods. This is way better than the first.

function translatePigLatin(str) {
  let vowelsRegex = /[aeiou]/gi;

  // Word starts with a vowel
  if (str[0].match(vowelsRegex)) {
    return str + 'way';

  } else if (!str.match(vowelsRegex)) {
    // Word without a vowel
    return str + 'ay';

  } else {
    // Get the number of consonants before the first vowel and grab the index of the first
    let vowelIndex = str.indexOf(str.match(vowelsRegex)[0]);
    // Handle words that begins with consonant clusters
    return str.substr(vowelIndex) + str.substr(0, vowelIndex) + 'ay';
  }
}
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