February 2, 2022

How to Extract First Character from String in Javascript

By Krishnaa JavaScript Questions 0 Comments

In this tutorial, you will learn how to extract first character from string in javascript. A string is formed with the combination of letters, numbers, or special characters. This means the very first character can be or cannot be a letter, number, or special character.

There are numerous ways to extract the first character from a string. 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 extract 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 extract the first 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 charAt() method and passing 0 as a parameter to extract the first character from the string. The first character is 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 = "Hello world";

btnGet.addEventListener("click", () => {
  let result = myString.charAt(0);
  output.innerText = result;
});

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