Reverse a String (spoilers)

1

Hi everyone, somewhat new to programming, first time poster.

This is the solution I came up with for this challenge:

function reverseString(str) {
  var reverse = str.split("").reverse().join("");
  str = reverse;
  return str;
}

reverseString("hello");

My original thought was to just do this, which did not work:

function reverseString(str) {
  str.split("").reverse().join("");
  return str;
}

reverseString("hello");

My question is: why is the first variable (reverse) necessary, and why does the second piece of code not work? Thanks.

3

Welcome to the forum!

I cleaned up your code.
You need to use triple backticks to post code to the forum.
See this post for details.

4

The second code doesn’t work, because you don’t save the result of str.split("").reverse().join("");. This line does not change str but returns a value that you will have to save somewhere. Or you can directly return it like this: return str.split("").reverse().join("");