In my opinion, this is the best solution!

that's Okey) just a small correction)

lol. I also completley forgot about that. I guess the test cases ignored that. but you could still implement it

Directly from the description: beast and dish may contain hyphens and spaces, but these will not appear at the beginning or end of the string.

But where is the logic for handling the '-' and ' ' at the first index and last index of each argument?

I always forget that you don’t need if statement for boolean values like this one, so clean

Strings have elements, arrays have elements. Certain iteration methods like map cant iterate a string without transforming it into an array. Certain ones can, like a for loop. You can access elements of a string the same way you can an array str[0]...

You can actually

It's iterable

In fact, you can. Read the docs.

clever way of doing this.

maybe.
If you are iterating the string from the begining, yes.
If I am not wrong, indexOf returns the position of the first elemene