What is an elegant way to take a javascript array, order by the frequency of the values, and then filter for uniques?
So,
["apples", "oranges", "oranges", "oranges", "bananas", "bananas", "oranges"]
becomes
["oranges, "bananas", "apples"]
Compute the frequency of each item first.
{
apples: 1,
oranges: 4,
bananas: 2
}
Then create an array from this frequency object which will also remove the duplicates.
["apples", "oranges", "bananas"]
Now sort this array in descending order using the frequency map we created earlier.
function compareFrequency(a, b) {
return frequency[b] - frequency[a];
}
array.sort(compareFrequency);
Here's the entire source (using the newly introduced Array functions in ECMA 5) and combining the de-duplication and frequency map generation steps,
function sortByFrequency(array) {
var frequency = {};
array.forEach(function(value) { frequency[value] = 0; });
var uniques = array.filter(function(value) {
return ++frequency[value] == 1;
});
return uniques.sort(function(a, b) {
return frequency[b] - frequency[a];
});
}
Same as above using the regular array iteration.
function sortByFrequencyAndRemoveDuplicates(array) {
var frequency = {}, value;
// compute frequencies of each value
for(var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
value = array[i];
if(value in frequency) {
frequency[value]++;
}
else {
frequency[value] = 1;
}
}
// make array from the frequency object to de-duplicate
var uniques = [];
for(value in frequency) {
uniques.push(value);
}
// sort the uniques array in descending order by frequency
function compareFrequency(a, b) {
return frequency[b] - frequency[a];
}
return uniques.sort(compareFrequency);
}