How to Check if String Starts with Space in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if string starts with space in javascript. It is very uncommon to have a space in the beginning of a string since in most of the cases it does not make any sense. Sometimes a leading space in a string may be present by mistake. For a newbie developer, it can be a bit tricky to find if a string starts with a space.
There are numerous ways to check if a string starts with a space. We are going to use one of the easiest solutions which involve the usage of the startsWith()
method and ternary (?
) operator. The startsWith()
method checks whether a given string starts with a specified string or not. 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 which holds a string as its value. Upon click of a button, we will check if the string starts with a space 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“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 a global variable
myVar
which holds a string as its value. - We have attached a
click
event listener to thebutton
element. - In the event handler function, we are using
startsWith()
method and ternary (?
) operator to check ifmyVar
starts with a space. - The
startsWith()
method will return true if the string starts with a space. - 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 myVar = " Time is very precious."; btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => { let result = myVar.startsWith(" ") ? "Yes" : "No"; output.innerText = result; });