Your solution is quite a bit slower than this one actually ;)

Benchmarking on the same input, this solution provides:

Ops/s: 5,122,611

Yours is:

Ops/s: 740,402

You're absolutely right. The sacrifice would be that you'd need a lookup table for the O(n) solution and thus you would require more memory. The solution here and the O(nlogn) solution use the same amount of memory.

You could solve it without sorting the array thus this problem is solvable in O(n).

the break after a return is redundant, a return end execution and breaks out of the switch.

Yeah, definitely a bit of opinion injection here on how to complete it. I agree with Alexandra, less initial code.

Big O is rarely my goal on here lol

O(n^2) when an O(nlogn) solution exists. However, this is short and simple. Codewars users seem to always prefer brevity over performance.

Damn, I forgot about substr. Well Done!

Bonkers

Thank you!

It matches all whitespace characters like tabs or newlines. It's not better, in fact it's likely slower, but it might be more robust in a real world scenario.

this is longer and more complicated than the original, so how do you think it's better?

Nice edge case addition