How to Delete First Word from String in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to delete first word from string in javascript. In order to make a sentence somewhat understandable, numerous words are used in it, and each word is separated by a space. From a developer perspective, it can be a bit tricky to delete first word from a string.

There are numerous ways to delete first word from a string. We are going to use the simplest approach which involves the usage of the split() method and slice() method. The split() method splits a given string into multiple substrings and return an array of those substrings.

The slice() method takes 2 parameters and they basically specify starting and ending index number of items in an array for slicing purposes. The second parameter is optional and by default, it is considered to be the length of the array.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will delete first word from the string 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 “Get” 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>Get</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 btnGet and output variables respectively.
  • We have attached a click event listener to the button element.
  • We have a global variable myString which holds a string as its value.
  • In the event handler function, we are calling split() method to get an array of words and we are storing that array in the words variable.
  • We are calling the slice() method and passing 1 as a parameter which is the index of the second word in the array. Further, we are calling join() method to form a single string of words.
  • As a result, we will get the string except for the first word and we are storing that in the result variable.
  • We are displaying the result in the h1 element using the innerText property.
let btnGet = document.querySelector("button");
let output = document.querySelector("h1");

let myString = "Wasted a lot of time in the past couple of days";

btnGet.addEventListener("click", () => {
  let words = myString.split(" ");
  let result = words.slice(1).join(" ");
  output.innerText = result;
});