String Objects – Specific Character

The method I am going to cover in today’s post is very similar to the last post (indexOf). Today, I am going to cover the charAt() method. This string method searches through a string to find a particular character whereas indexOf() is primarily used to find substrings or groups of characters.

Let’s take a look at an example…

// Variable to house string
var myString = "This is my cool string!";
// Variable to house results of charAt()
var findC = myString.charAt(11);
// Output results...should be 'c'
console.log(findC);

As you can see from above, we pass charAt() a numeric value as opposed to an actual string like indexOf(). This value is the location of the character. This is also zero-based in its indexing count. So the ‘c’ is in the twelfth position, but since we start with zero, I used eleven (11).

So you can utilize this function to pick out certain characters and use them in your coding. For example, say you have a listing of employees and you want to output all of the ones that have a last name that begins with ‘P’. Well, you can do something like this…

if(lastName.charAt(0) === 'P'){
    // doSomething();
}

Happy Coding!

Clay Hess