How to Check if a String Contains More Than One Character in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if a string contains more than one character in javascript. There are certain primitive types in javascript and string is one of them. As the name suggests, any variable that holds a plain text as its value is considered to be of string type.

There are numerous ways to check if a string contains more than one character. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use length property and ternary operator (?). The length property returns the length of the string. If the string is empty, then it will return 0. The ternary operator is also known as the conditional operator which acts similar to the if-else statement.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will check if the string contains more than one character 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 “Check” 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>Check</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 btnCheck 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 using the length property and ternary operator (?) to check if myString length greater than 1. If the length is greater than 1, that means we have more than one character in the string. Depending upon the result of the check, we will assign “Yes” or “No” to the result variable.
  • We are displaying the result in the h1 element using the innerText property.
let btnCheck = document.querySelector("button");
let output = document.querySelector("h1");

let myString = "Hello World";

btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => {

  let result = myString.length > 1 ? "Yes" : "No";
  output.innerText = result;
  
});