JavaScript Challenge 1: Simple Pig Latin
Tags: javascript, challenge, beginners, codenewbie
Published: 2020-09-29 23:19:46

---
canonical_url: https://inspiredwebdev.com/javascript-pig-latin
---

> This article was originally posted on my [blog](https://inspiredwebdev.com/javascript-pig-latin). Head over to [inspiredwebdev.com](https://inspiredwebdev.com) for more articles and tutorials. Check out my **JavaScript course** on [Educative](https://www.educative.io/courses/complete-guide-to-modern-javascript?aff=BqmB) to learn everything from ES6 to ES2020.

&nbsp;

In this article we will solve together the *Simple Pig Latin* challenge from CodeWars, you can find it at this [link](https://www.codewars.com/kata/520b9d2ad5c005041100000f).

Let's read the task together:

> Move the first letter of each word to the end of it, then add "ay" to the end of the word. Leave punctuation marks untouched

The first example given to us is this one

`pigIt('Pig latin is cool'); // igPay atinlay siay oolcay`

Alright, after reading it one time we can already see different ways of solving this problem:

- Using RegEx to remove the first character after space and to add `ay` at the end of each word
- Splitting the string in an array and iterating over each portion

RegEx can be very powerful and allow you to do a lot in very little but they can also get very hard to read for your others and also for yourself going back to a project after several times.

Let's go with the more basic approach of using `JavaScript` to iterate over the string and perform our modifications.

First, let's split our string into an array:

```JavaScript
const arr = str.split(" ");
```

Next, we want to iterate over the array, removing the first character and appending it at the end, followed by `ay`.

```javascript
arr.map((word) => {
    return `${word.substr(1)}${word.substr(0,1)}ay`
})
```

Here we are iterating over the strings with `map` and at each iteration, we remove the first character with `substr(1)` which will return us a substring from character 1 to the end of the string, then we add the first letter and finally we append `ay` at the end of it.

The only problem with this implementation is that it will not skip characters such as !,? etc...
Let's use a very simple RegEx to determine if our character is a letter.

We can implement a simple check like the following:

`word.match(/[A-z]/i)`

This will ensure that only characters from a-z will be taken into account

Now let's put everything together:

```javascript
function pigIt(str) {
    const arr = str.split(' ');
    return arr.map((word) => {
        return word.match(/[A-z]/i) ?
            `${word.substr(1)}${word.substr(0,1)}ay` : word
    }).join(' ');
}
```

There you have it, a simple functions that will:

- iterate over each word in a string
- remove the first letter of said string and add it at the end of it
- append `ay` at the end of each word

### If you liked this type of content, please let me know in the comments and I'll create more of these.

---

If you want to learn everything about JavaScript from ES6 all the way to ES2020, please check out my book available to read for free on <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/AlbertoMontalesi/The-complete-guide-to-modern-JavaScript">Github</a>. A course is also on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.educative.io/courses/complete-guide-to-modern-javascript?aff=BqmB"> Educative</a>


[![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/swcj7lo1pezugu6m1w95.png)](https://www.educative.io/courses/complete-guide-to-modern-javascript?aff=BqmB)

&nbsp;