How to Remove First and Last Character from String in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to remove first and last character from string in javascript. The first and last characters in a string can or cannot be letters, numbers, or special characters because a string is a combination of random characters. Only in cases where a character is unnecessary, it must be removed.  From a developer perspective, it can be a bit tricky to remove first and last character from string.

There are numerous ways to remove first and last character from string. A string consists of multiple characters and these characters in a string have a 0-based index. To trim a string to a particular length, we can make use of the slice() method.

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

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will remove first and last character 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 the slice() method and passing 2 parameters; 1 and index of the last character. The number 1 is the index of second character in the string. To get the index of last character, we need to substract 1 from the length of the string.
  • As a result, slice() method will remove first and last character from string and the final string will be stored 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 = "Jjane is goingg";

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