How to find most used character in a string

How can we find out what's the most used character in a sentence? Well... lots and lots of ways to do that. I'll show you here 2 (disclaimer that I'm a really big fan of reduce):

1. Using reduce()

   function mostUsedCharacter(str) { let obj = {}; let max = 0; return str.split("").reduce((acc, char) => { obj[char] = obj[char] + 1 || 1; // +1 to the char in obj if (obj[char] > max) { // if current char > max max = obj[char]; // set max = amount of times char appeared return char; // return char } // if current char < current max amount of times a char appeared, return current max return acc; }, str[0]); }

2. Using for-loop

   function mostUsedCharacter(str) { let obj = {}; let max = 0; let mostUsedChar = str[0]; for (let char of str) { obj[char] = obj[char] + 1 || 1; if (obj[char] > max) { max = obj[char]; mostUsedChar = char; } } return mostUsedChar; }

The basic idea of both methods is:

• store somewhere a list with each character and the amount of times it has been used
• return the biggest number from the list