How to make abbreviations/acronyms in JavaScript?

Question

new to coding I'm trying to make a function that makes "abbreviations/acronyms" of words, e.g. 'I love you' -> 'ily'. I've tried rewriting the code in many ways but console.log only shows me the first letter of the first given word.

function makeAbbr(words) {
  let abbrev = words[0];
  let after = 0;
  let i = 0;
  for (const letter of words) {
    if (letter === '') {
      i = words.indexOf('', after);
      abbrev += words[i + 1];
    }
    after++;
  }
  return abbrev;
}
const words = 'a bc def';
let result = makeAbbr(words);
console.log(result)

Answer 1

here is my implementation of your function: Split the sentence into an array, get the first letter of each word and join them into one string.

const makeAbbr = string => string.split(' ').map(word => word[0]).join('');

console.log(makeAbbr('stack overflow'));
console.log(makeAbbr('i love you'));

`

Answer 2

Without using arrays. But you really should learn about them.

1. Start by trimming leading and trailing whitespace.
2. Add the first character to your acronym.
3. Loop over the rest of the string and add the current character to the acronym if the previous character was a space (and the current character isn't).

function makeAbbr(words) {
  words = words.trim();
  const length = words.length;
  let acronym = words[0];

  for(let i = 1; i < length; i++) {
    if(words[i - 1] === ' ' && words[i] !== ' ') {
       acronym += words[i];
    }
  }

  return acronym;
}
console.log(makeAbbr('I love you'));
console.log(makeAbbr('I     love     you'));
console.log(makeAbbr('   I    love    you   '));

---

And here's the version for GottZ

function w(char) {
   char = char.toLocaleLowerCase();
   const coll = Intl.Collator('en');
   const cmpA = coll.compare(char, 'a');
   const cmpZ = coll.compare(char, 'z');

   return cmpA >= 0 && cmpZ <= 0;
}

function makeAbbr(words) {
  words = words.trim();
  const length = words.length;
  if(!length) return '';

  let acronym = words[0];

  for(let i = 1; i < length; i++) {
    if(!w(words[i - 1]) && w(words[i])) {
       acronym += words[i];
    }
  }

  return acronym;
}
console.log(makeAbbr('I love you'));
console.log(makeAbbr('I     love     you'));
console.log(makeAbbr('   I    love    you   '));
console.log(makeAbbr('   \tI ...  ! love \n\r   .you   '));
console.log(makeAbbr('   \tI ...  ! Löve \n\r   .ÿou   '));