Good afternoon! Here's our prompt for today.

Understanding Anagrams: A Simple Definition

An anagram is a fascinating literary device where you can rearrange the letters of a word, phrase, or name to form another meaningful sequence. Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle made of letters. For example, the word "cinema" can be rearranged to form "iceman."

The Challenge: Detecting Anagrams

Problem Statement

Given two input strings like "cinema" and "iceman," your task is to implement a method called isAnagram(str1, str2). This method should return true if the given strings are anagrams of each other and false otherwise.

Constraints to Consider

Computational Limits

• The length of both input strings will be less than or equal to 100,000.

Character Rules

• The input strings will only contain alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).

Performance Expectations

• The expected time complexity for this operation is O(nlogn).
• The expected space complexity is O(n).

Empty Strings are Valid

• The input strings can be empty. Imagine that as a puzzle with no pieces; it's trivially solvable!

Coding the Solution

Given the constraints and expectations, you'll need to think carefully about your algorithm. The aim is not just to solve the problem, but to solve it efficiently within the given computational and space boundaries.

Try to solve this here or in Interactive Mode.

How do I practice this challenge?

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var assert = require('assert');

​

function isAnagram(str1, str2) {

  // fill this in

  return true;

}

​

try {

  assert.equal(isAnagram('Mary', 'Army'), true);

​

  console.log('PASSED: ' + "`isAnagram('Mary', 'Army')` should return true");

} catch (err) {

  console.log(err);

}

​

try {

  assert.equal(isAnagram('cinema', 'iceman'), true);

​

  console.log(

    'PASSED: ' + "`isAnagram('cinema', 'iceman')` should return true"

  );

} catch (err) {

  console.log(err);

}

​

try {

  assert.equal(isAnagram('jake', 'jay'), false);

​

  console.log('PASSED: ' + "`isAnagram('jake', 'jay')` should return false");

Here's a video of us explaining the solution.

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We'll now take you through what you need to know.

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