How to Remove First 2 Letters from String in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to remove first 2 letters from string in javascript. Since a string is built with the help of multiple characters such as letters, numbers as well as special characters, the position of the first 2 letters varies.
There are numerous ways to remove the first 2 letters from a string. We are going to create a custom function that involves the usage of the match()
method and for
loop to find the first 2 letters in the string. Later, we will use replace()
method to get rid of the first 2 letters.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will remove the first 2 letters 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 thebutton
element. - We have a global variable
myString
which holds a string as its value. - In the event handler function, we are calling the
removeLetters()
method and passingmyString
and 2 as parameters. This method will be responsible for removing the first 2 letters and returning the rest of the string. - In the
removeLetters()
method, we are usingfor
loop to loop through all the characters. Inside the loop, we are checking whether a character is letter or not using thematch()
method which takes/[a-zA-Z]/g
as a regex pattern. As a result, we are getting an array of letters or null which we are storing in theisLetter
variable. - We are skipping the replacement part using the
continue
statement if the character is not a letter. - Further, we are calling the
replace()
method and passing it 2 parameters; char and an empty string. As a result, it will remove first 2 letters from the string. - The final string is stored in the
newStr
variable. - We are getting out of the loop using the
break
statement after removing the first 2 letters. - The returned string is stored in the
result
variable and we are displaying theresult
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnGet = document.querySelector("button"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); let myString = "123 Hello world"; btnGet.addEventListener("click", () => { let result = removeLetters(myString, 2); output.innerText = result; }); function removeLetters(str, num) { let newStr = str; let count = 0; for (const char of str) { let isLetter = char.match(/[a-zA-Z]/g); if (!isLetter) continue; newStr = newStr.replace(char, ""); count++; if (count == num) break; } return newStr; }