Stuck on prime number algorithm, please help!

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Hi everyone - I am working on the sum of all primes algorithm and it works for numbers up to 27 - but at 27 it breaks as it thinks 27 is a prime number! I am confused please help!

  **Your code so far**

function sumPrimes(num) { 

//find all the numbers in the range
let range = [];
for (let i = 2; i <= num; i++){
  range.push(i);
}



//iterate through each number in the range and check if is divisible by anything

for (let j = 0; j < range.length; j++){

for (let k = 2; k < num; k++){
  if (range[j] % k === 0){
    if(range[j] != k){
    range.splice(j, 1)
    
  } 
  }
}
}
return range.reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0);

}




console.log(sumPrimes(27));
  **Your browser information:**

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14388.61.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.107 Safari/537.36

Challenge: Sum All Primes

Link to the challenge:

splicing out array entries as you iterate over the array is dangerous:

function sumPrimes(num) {
  //find all the numbers in the range
  let range = [];
  for (let i = 2; i <= num; i++) {
    range.push(i);
  }

  //iterate through each number in the range and check if is divisible by anything
  for (let j = 0; j < range.length; j++) {
    console.log("checking:", range[j]);
    for (let k = 2; k < num; k++) {
      if (range[j] % k === 0) {
        console.log("" + range[j] + " is divisible by " + k);
        if (range[j] != k) {
          range.splice(j, 1);
        }
        console.log("range is now:", range);
      }
    }
  }

  console.log("final range:", range);
  return range.reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0);
}

console.log(sumPrimes(27));

Side note: this approach will fail the big tests because it is a bit too slow. I’d ask yourself

  1. do you need to build the range?
  2. do you need to keep checking values of k if you found one that divides into your number?

Thanks for looking at it so splicing changes index numbers of array?

Ok so better to iterate through all numbers up to num and push into a new array?

How do i stop the loop once i have met the condition?

Splicing doesn’t change the index exactly. If you remove item 3 from a list containing 5 items, what do you call what used to be the 5th item?

  • Item 1
  • Item 2
  • Item 3
  • Item 4
  • Item 5

I would ditch the idea of an array altogether. Why do you want an array?

Ok thanks - i have done another one now which works!

I made a function to check for primes and then just added the primes to the result sum.

I guess i just got obsessed with arrays as a lot of the algorithms i have done recently involves them!

Thanks for your help

Good work!

This is one that a lot of people want to use an array for. There is a really fast algorithm that uses an array, but it’s different than the approach you took.

In general, when making an array, ask yourself how many times you will use the data inside the array. If it’s only once (like to sum it), then you probably don’t want an array.

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