How to Get the First and Last Character of a String in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to get the first and last character of a string in javascript. A string is formed with the help of letters, numbers, and special characters. This means the very first or last character can be or cannot be a letter, number, or special character.
There are numerous ways to get the first and last character of a string. A string consists of multiple characters and these characters in a string have a 0-based index. To get a character by index, we can make use of the charAt()
method.
The length
property of a string returns the number of total characters in that string. To get the index of the last character in the string, we just need to subtract 1 from the length. The first character will be at index 0 by default.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will get the first and last character of 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
, 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 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 the
charAt()
method and passing 0 as a parameter to get the first character of the string. The first character is stored in thefirst
variable. - We are getting the index of the last character by subtracting 1 from the
length
of the string and storing the index number in thelastCharIndex
variable. - We are calling the
charAt()
method and passinglastCharIndex
as a parameter to get the last character of the string. The last character is stored in thelast
variable. - We are forming a template string by using the
last
andfirst
variables and storing that in 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 first = myString.charAt(0); let lastCharIndex = myString.length - 1; let last = myString.charAt(lastCharIndex); let result = `First: ${first} - Last: ${last}`; output.innerText = result; });