How to Check if a String Starts with Capital Letter in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if a string starts with capital letter in javascript. Depending upon the position of the string in a sentence, the first letter of a string could be or could not be in the capital. In a standard keyboard layout, we have Caps Lock and shift keys and with the help of those keys, we can type letters in the capital.
There are numerous ways to detect whether a string starts with capital letter or not. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use the regular expression and ternary operator (?
) to accomplish our goal. The test()
method of RegExpObject is used to perform a pattern search in a string and returns a Boolean value.
A string consists of multiple characters and these characters in a string have a 0-based index. That means the first character in a string has an index of 0 and to get that character by index, we can use charAt()
method.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will check whether the string starts with capital letter or not 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 the button element is“Check”
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>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 andh1
element using thedocument.querySelector()
method and stored them inbtnCheck
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. - We have the
regExp
variable which holds a regular expression/[A-Z]/
as its value. - In the event handler function, we are calling the
charAt()
method and passing 0 as a parameter to get the first letter of the string. - We are calling the
test()
method ofregExp
and passing the first letter of the string as a parameter. It will return a Boolean value which we are storing in theisMatch
variable. - We are using the ternary operator (
?
) and checking whetherisMatch
is true or false. Depending upon the result of the check, we will assign“Yes”
or“No”
to theresult
variable. - We are displaying the
result
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnCheck = document.querySelector("button"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); let myString = "Hello world!"; let regExp = /[A-Z]/; btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => { let isMatch = regExp.test(myString.charAt(0)) let result = isMatch ? "Yes" : "No"; output.innerText = result; });