How to Check if a String Contains Specific Words in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if a string contains specific words in javascript. Instead of having an individual variable for each word, it is better to have a collection of words in the form of an array. An array is just a collection of items and these items can be of any data type.

A string consists of multiple characters and these characters can be letters, numbers, or special characters. For a beginner, it can be a bit tricky to find if a string contains specific words.

There are numerous ways to check if a string contains specific words. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use include() method, every() method and ternary operator (?) to accomplish our goal.

The includes() method is used to perform a case-sensitive search to detect whether a string contains another string or not and returns a Boolean value. The every() method executes a certain function for each element in an array. The every() method returns true if the returned value of the function is true for all elements.

In the following example, we have 2 global variables, an array and a string. Upon click of a button, we will check if the string contains specific words and display the result on the screen.  Please have a look over the code example and the steps given below.

HTML & CSS

  • We have 3 elements in the HTML file (div, button, and h1). The div element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements.
  • The innerText for the button element is “Check” and for the h1 element, it is “Result”.
  • We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our style.css stylesheet inside the head element.
  • We have also included our javascript file script.js with a script tag at the bottom.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
  <title>Document</title>
</head>

<body>

  <div class="container">    
    <button>Check</button>
    <h1>Result</h1>
  </div>

  <script src="script.js"></script>
</body>

</html>
.container {        
    text-align: center;
}

button {
  margin-top: 10px;
  padding: 10px 20px;
}

Javascript

  • We have selected the button element and h1 element using the document.querySelector() method and stored them in btnCheck and output variables respectively.
  • We have attached a click event listener to the button element.
  • We have 2 global variables myString and words. We need to check if myString contains specific words present in words array.
  • In the event handler function, we are calling every() method on words and looping through each element in the array. We are using includes() to check if myString contains specific words present in words array.
  • After the completion, every() method will return either true or false. We are storing that in the found variable. If it is true, that means myString does contain specific words present in words array.
  • Depending upon the result of the check, we will assign “Yes” or “No” to the result variable.
  • We are displaying the result in the h1 element using the innerText property.
let btnCheck = document.querySelector("button");
let output = document.querySelector("h1");

let words = ["house", "doctor", "Ronald"];
let myString = "Ronald is a doctor and he leaves nearby my house";

btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => {
  let found = words.every((item) => myString.includes(item));
  let result = found ? "Yes" : "No";
  output.innerText = result;
});