How to Get Only Alphabets from String in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to get only alphabets from string in javascript. Any character that is not part of English alphabet is considered to be a non-letter character. This means both numbers and special characters are non-letter characters.
There are numerous ways to get only alphabets from a string. We are going to use the simplest approach which involves the usage of the regex pattern as well as replace()
method. The replace()
method searches the string for a particular value or a regex pattern and it returns a new string with the replaced values.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will get only alphabets 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
, andh1
). Thediv
element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements. - The
innerText
for thebutton
element is“Replace”
. - 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>Replace</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 inbtnReplace
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 are displaying the original string in the
h1
element using theinnerText
property. - In the event handler function, we have
regex
variable that holds a regex pattern/[^a-z]/gi
as its value. - We are calling
replace()
method and passingregex
and empty string as parameters. As a result, it will get only alphabets from the string. The new string returned by this method will be stored in theresult
variable. - We are displaying the
result
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnReplace = document.querySelector("button"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); let myString = `a$b#c*d@e!123A2B`; output.innerText = myString; btnReplace.addEventListener("click", () => { let regex = /[^a-z]/gi; let result = myString.replace(regex, ""); output.innerText = result; });