AlgoDaily 01: Array Intersection

I’ve signed up to AlgoDaily as it seems like a fun way to get out some small blog posts on small coding tasks.

This is AlgoDaily Day 1: Array Intersection.

“Can you write a function that takes two inputs and returns their intersection? All element in the final result should be unique.”

const nums1 = [1, 2, 2, 1];
const nums2 = [2, 2];

intersection(nums1, nums2);
// [2]

“Here’s another one:”

const nums1 = [4, 9, 5];
const nums2 = [9, 4, 9, 8, 4];

intersection(nums1, nums2);
// [9, 4]

Here’s my first-thought naive implementation:

function intersection(setA, setB) {
	return setA.reduce((intersected, x) => {
		if (setB.includes(x) && !intersected.includes(x)) {
			intersected.push(x);
		}
		return intersected;
	}, []);
}

The idea is to filter setA to those that are also in setB, while also ignoring duplicate items.

Testing it out:

intersection([1, 2, 2, 1], [2, 2]);
// Array [ 2 ]

intersection([4, 9, 5], [9, 4, 9, 8, 4]);
// Array [ 4, 9 ]

It might be more straightforward to just do a filter and then use a Set to remove the duplicates:

function intersection(arrayA, arrayB) {
	return [...new Set(setA.filter(x => setB.includes(x)))]
}

That does seem a lot cleaner.

Going through the test cases in AlgoDaily:

intersection([6, 0, 12, 10, 16], [3, 15, 18, 20, 15]);
// Array []

intersection([1, 5, 2, 12, 6], [13, 10, 9, 5, 8]);
// Array [ 5 ]

intersection([4, 17, 4, 4, 15, 16, 17, 6, 7], [15, 2, 6, 20, 17, 17, 8, 4, 5]);
// Array(4) [ 4, 17, 15, 6 ]

intersection([3], [15]);
// Array []

intersection([2, 16, 8, 9], [14, 15, 2, 20]);
// Array [ 2 ]

It turns out that AlgoDaily‘s suggested solution is very similar to the version using Set().

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