Find the word in a string that has the most repeated characters

The problem: I want to find the word in a string that has the most repeats of a single letter, each letter is independent. Does not need to be consecutive.

Currently I am jumping each character and checking, which doesn't seem very efficient. Do you have any ideas that might improve the number of processes that are required to find which word has the most repeats?

function LetterCountI(str) { 

  var repeatCountList = [];
  var wordList = str.split(/\W/); //regular expression \W for non word characters split at.
  var wordCount = wordList.length; // count the number of words
  for (var i=0; i=mostRepeat)              // record repeat for the highest only
       {mostRepeat=repeatCount}

    }
   repeatCountList = repeatCountList.concat(mostRepeat)    // take the highest from each word
     }

  mostRepeat = 0;                     // set the repeats value to -
  for (j=0;jmostRepeat)       // if it has more repeats than the highest So FAR
       { mostRepeat = repeatCountList[j];        // record if higher than last
        var x = j;}}                      // record the index of the most repeat that is the new high
  var ans = [];             
  if (mostRepeat == 1)              // check if there are no repeats at all.
  {ans=-1}                // question want to return -1 if there are no repeats
  else
  {ans=wordList[x]}          // display the word from the list with the most repeat characters

  // code goes here  
  return ans; 

}

Any help is appreciated.

I liked that you split the string into words using a regular expression. That helps a lot.

Your code formatting (indentation and braces) is haphazard. It shouldn't be that hard to follow the standard conventions for code formatting, and it will make things easier for yourself if you do.

I think your function tries to do too much. It would help to break down the problem. I've extracted part of the problem into a self-contained task:


Given a word, how many times does the most frequent character appear?

For that, you can write a function, and test it (e.g. mostFrequentCount('hello') should return 2).

/**
 * Given an array (or a string), returns the number of times the most frequent
 * element (or character) appears.
 */
function mostFrequentCount(elements) {
    var bins = {};
    for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
        bins[elements[i]] = (bins[elements[i]] || 0) + 1;
    }
    var max = 0;
    for (var c in bins) {
        max = Math.max(max, bins[c]);
    }
    return max;
}

That should simplify the main code. Rather than commenting each line (in effect writing everything once for the computer and once for other programmers), I've tried to make the code read like English by using very human-friendly variable names.

function wordsWithMaxRepeatedCharacters(string) {
    var maxRepeatedCharacters = 0, wordsWithMaxRepeatedCharacters = [];

    var words = string.split(/\W/);
    for (var w = 0; w < words.length; w++) {
        var word = words[w];
        var numRepeatedCharacters = mostFrequentCount(word);

        if (maxRepeatedCharacters < numRepeatedCharacters) {
            maxRepeatedCharacters = numRepeatedCharacters;
            wordsWithMaxRepeatedCharacters = [word];
        } else if (maxRepeatedCharacters == numRepeatedCharacters) {
            wordsWithMaxRepeatedCharacters.push(word);
        }
    }
    return wordsWithMaxRepeatedCharacters;
}

StackExchange Code Review Q#40027, answer score: 8