How to Check if a String is Not Empty in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if a string is not empty in javascript. A string is considered to be empty when it does not have any characters or content in it and as a result, the length of that string will always be 0.

There are numerous ways to check if a string is not empty. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use a strict equality operator (===) along with logical NOT(!) operator to accomplish our goal.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will check if the string is not empty 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 a global variable myString which holds an empty string as its value.
  • In the event handler function, we are using a strict equality operator (===) and logical NOT (!) operator to check whether myString is empty or not. Depending upon the result of the check, we will assign “Empty” or “Not Empty” 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 myString = "Hello World";

btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => { 
  
  let result = myString !== "" ? "Not Empty" : "Empty";
  output.innerText = result;
  
});