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Go Practice Exercises

Anagram Check in Go

Do two texts use exactly the same letters? Sort the letters of both and compare.

  • Beginner
  • 3 min read
  • 1 runnable example
What you'll learn
  • Normalizing text
  • slices.Sort on runes
  • Comparing the results
Run code →
listen and silent
listen
  • sorted
  • eilnst
silent
  • sorted
  • eilnst

Same letters, different order

Two words are anagrams when one can be made by rearranging the letters of the other, such as listen and silent. Sorting the letters of both gives the same result exactly when they are anagrams.

normalize makes the text lower case, drops the spaces and sorts the remaining characters with slices.Sort. Two texts are anagrams when their normalized forms are equal.

Key points

  1. Lower case and drop the spaces.
  2. Sort the letters of each text.
  3. Equal sorted forms mean an anagram.

Runnable Go example

Go
Run code →
main.go
package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"slices"
	"strings"
)

func normalize(text string) string {
	runes := []rune{}
	for _, r := range strings.ToLower(text) {
		if r != ' ' {
			runes = append(runes, r)
		}
	}
	slices.Sort(runes)
	return string(runes)
}

func isAnagram(a, b string) bool {
	return normalize(a) == normalize(b)
}

func main() {
	fmt.Println(isAnagram("listen", "silent"))
	fmt.Println(isAnagram("Dormitory", "dirty room"))
	fmt.Println(isAnagram("gopher", "golang"))
}
Get a Run button for this example Result of running the code
true
true
false

Practice

Open the example in the online compiler, change a value or add a line, and predict the output before you run it. Then break the code on purpose and read the compiler's message.

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