How to Check if String has Text in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if string has text in javascript. A text is just a string which consists of multiple characters such as numbers, letters, or special characters. For a newbie developer, it can be a bit tricky to find if the string has a text.

There are numerous ways to check if a string has a text. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use the includes() method and ternary operator (?) to accomplish our goal. The includes() method is used to perform a case-sensitive search to detect whether a string contains another string or not and returns a Boolean value.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will check if it has a text 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 includes() method and ternary operator (?) to verify whether myString has the “sky” text or not. The includes() method will return true if the string has the text.
  • 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 = "The color of the sky is blue.";

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

  let result = myString.includes("sky") ? "Yes" : "No";
  output.innerText = result;
  
});