July 4, 2022

How to Remove Specific Character from Start of String in Javascript

By Krishnaa JavaScript Questions 0 Comments

In this tutorial, you will learn how to remove specific character from start of string in javascript. Sentences can contain numbers and other symbols even though they often only contain letters. From a developer perspective, it can be a bit tricky to remove specific character from start of string.

There are numerous ways to remove specific character from start of string. A string consists of multiple characters and these characters in a string have a 0-based index. To get the rest of the string after the removal of the first character, we can make use of the substring() method. We can also use charAt() method to get the character by its index.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will remove specific character from start of 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 getting the first character using charAt() method and storing it in the firstChar variable.
We are checking whether firstChar is equal to character "S".
In case the condition returns true, we are calling the substring() method and passing 1 as a parameter. This digit 1 is the index of the second character. As a result, we will get a new string except for the first character.
In case the condition returns false, we are making no changes to the string.
The final string 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 = "She always makes me angry";

btnGet.addEventListener("click", () => {  
  let firstChar = myString.charAt(0);
  let result = firstChar == 'S' ? myString.substring(1) : myString;
  output.innerText = result;
});

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