Smallest Common Multiple: past all but last one

JavaScript
1

Tell us what’s happening:
I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my code. It passes ALL tests except for the final one which requires me to find the smallest common multiple of 23 and 18 given the requirements.

The idea behind my code is:
the LCM must be multiple of the max number ,so I check the multiples of the max number and check if it can be evenly divided by every item using array.every() function.

I have two issues here:

  1. if I use “console.log(temp);” the [1,13] will fail too, if comment out, it will pass;
  2. if I change maxItem to arrR[0]*arrR[1], it will pass all test cases; but if set maxItem to arrR[0], it will pass all but the last one case [23,18].

I spent a lot time finding the error ,but I still failed to find the cause of it.
Please help me , thanks a lot.

Your code so far


function smallestCommons(arr) {
  let i;
  var arrR=[];

  //get the array 
  for(i=Math.max(...arr);i>=Math.min(...arr);i--){
    arrR.push(i);
  }
 
  //get the lcm
  var maxItem = arrR[0];
  var temp;
  for(i=1;;i++){ 
    temp = maxItem*i;//the lcm must be multiple of max number,so check 
    //console.log(temp);
    if( arrR.every(el=> temp%el==0) ){
      return temp;
    }
  }

}


smallestCommons([23,18]);

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.84 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:
https://learn.freecodecamp.org/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/intermediate-algorithm-scripting/smallest-common-multiple

2

if you search the forum you will find other posts about this same issue.
your code is taking too long to complete so it hits the FCC timeout (that protects against infinite loops).

You will need either to workaround this (there is a flag you can use in the code) or find an algorithm that runs in a shorter time. (you will find discussions about this on the forum if you search)

4

Thank you very much.
From your explanation, I know that it fails because of run time too long, not that it doesn’t work.
I am a little puzzled about “there is a flag you can use in the code”(what flag? use to do what?) , could you please explain more?Thanks a lot.