Find the K closest points to the origin (0, 0)

Question

The problem is, given a list of coordinates, determine the number of k coordinates that are closest to the origin.

I have been able to determine the distance between the points and origin, however when filtering for the closest k points, I am lost. I decided to place this logic in a the second for loop, sort the array of distance from closest to furthest, and push the values that are less than K.

function kClosest(points, k) {
    let length = [];
    let arr = [];
    let result = [];
    let a = 0;
    let b = 0;

    for (let i = 0; i < points.length; i++) {
        a = points[i][0]; //x coord
        b = points[i][1]; //y coord (y will always be second number or '1')
        length.push(parseFloat(calcHypotenuse(a, b).toFixed(4)))
        arr.push([points[i], length[i]])
    }

    function calcHypotenuse(a, b) {
        return (Math.sqrt((a * a) + (b * b)));
    }

    for (let i = 0; i < k; i++) {
        arr = arr.sort();
        result.push(arr[i][0])
    }
    return result;
}



console.log(kClosest([
    [-5, 4],
    [-6, -5],
    [4, 6]
], K = 2))

Expected output: [-5, 4], [4, 6] // I had [-5, 4], [-6, -5]

Answer 1

I suggest using a custom sort for this - you can pass Array.sort() a comparison function, like this:

function kClosest(points, k) {

    //sorts the array in place
    points.sort((point1, point2) => {
        const distanceFromOrigin1 = getDistanceFromOrigin(point1);
        const distanceFromOrigin2 = getDistanceFromOrigin(point2);

        //sort by distance from origin, lowest first
        return distanceFromOrigin1 - distanceFromOrigin2;
    });

    //returns first k elements
    return points.slice(0, k);
}

function getDistanceFromOrigin(point) {
    const [x, y] = point; //array destructuring
    return (x*x) + (y*y);
}

console.log(kClosest([
    [-5, 4],
    [-6, -5],
    [4, 6]
], 2))

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/sort for more details on custom sorting.