April 5, 2022
How to Find Length of String in Javascript Without Using Length Method
In this tutorial, you will learn how to find length of string in javascript without using length method. The length of a string represents the total number of characters in that string.
There are numerous ways to find the length of a string. For the sake of simplicity, we always use length
property. But today, we are going to use reduce()
method. This method executes a reducer function on each element of an array.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will find the length of the string and display it 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
, andh1
). Thediv
element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements. - The
innerText
for thebutton
element is“Get”
and for theh1
element, it is“Result”
. - We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our
style.css
stylesheet inside thehead
element. - We have also included our javascript file
script.js
with ascript
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 andh1
element using thedocument.querySelector()
method and stored them inbtnGet
andoutput
variables respectively. - We have a global variable
myString
which holds a string as its value. - We have attached a
click
event listener to thebutton
element. - In the event handler function, we are calling
getStringLength()
method and passingmyString
as a parameter. This method will return length of the string. - In the
getStringLength()
method, we are usingArray.from()
method to convert string into an array of characters. - We are also using
reduce()
method and providing 0 as the second parameter to act as our default accumulated value to start with. If you do not provide it, then reduce method will pick the first element from the array. In case, your array is empty and there is no default accumulated value, then you will get an error. That’s why it is important to provide some default accumulated value to start with. - We are assigning the returned value to the
length
variable and returning it. - We are assigning the returned value from
getStringLength()
to theresult
variable. - We are displaying the
result
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnGet = document.querySelector("button"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); let myString = "Hello world"; btnGet.addEventListener("click", () => { let result = getStringLength(myString); output.innerText = result; }); function getStringLength(str){ let length = Array.from(str).reduce(function(count){return count+1}, 0); return length }