Grab Character(s) At Certain Position In String With JavaScript

July 17, 2020 by Andreas Wik

Grab character at certain position from string with JavaScript

To grab one or more characters at a certain position in a string, the built-in JavaScript function substr() is really handy. 

It takes two arguments, the position where to start (as with arrays, the index starts with 0, so the third character in a string would be at position 2) and how many characters to extract.

Let’s say we got the following string:

const movie = 'Bad Taste'

 

To grab the first character in the string we would tell substr() to start at 0 and grab 1 character.

// Get first character
const firstChar = movie.substr(0, 1)
console.log(`First character is ${firstChar}`)

 

Same thing but grabbing the third character in the string.

// Get third character
const thirdChar = movie.substr(2, 1)
console.log(`Third character is ${thirdChar}`)

 

To extract the last character of the string we can use the string’s length minus one to get the position of the it.

// Get last character
const lastChar = movie.substr(movie.length-1, 1)
console.log(`Last character is ${lastChar}`)

 

To grab multiple characters, change the second argument to your desired number.

// Get first 3 characters
const firstThreeChars = movie.substr(0, 3)
console.log(`First 3 characters are ${firstThreeChars}`)

 

JSFiddle:

GTA IV

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