We can remove the first and last character from a string using JavaScript easily with the use of the String slice() method.
var newString = oldString.slice(1,-1);
The code above will return the original string minus the first and last characters.
Let’s say we have the following JavaScript:
var someString = "This is some example text";
var newString = someString.slice(1,-1);
In the above code, newString will have the following value after applying the substring method to the original string:
We can also remove JUST the first character from a string using the substring() method and remove JUST the last character from a string using the slice() method.
Let’s take a look at another simple example.
Removing the First and Last Characters From a String in JavaScript with a Click
In this simple example, we will have a really long string to start out. We will then provide a button to let the user remove the first and last characters from that string as many times as they want.
Here is the HTML setup:
Remove first and last characters
First, we will populate the div #updatedString with a long string we will make up.
We will then add an onclick event to our #click-me div that will run a function we will create called removeFirstLastCharacters(). Our function will remove the first and last characters of the string using the slice() method.
We will finally update the #updatedString div using the textContent property with the new string.
Here is the JavaScript code:
//Our string
var startingString = "This is a long string that we can remove the first character from as many times as we want by pressing the button below.";
//We will populate the div #updatedString with our string
document.getElementById("updatedString").textContent = startingString;
function removeFirstLastCharacters(){
//We remove the first and last character of the string
startingString = startingString.slice(1,-1);
//We will then update the div #updatedString with our new string
document.getElementById("updatedString").textContent = startingString;
}
The final code and output for removing the first and last character from a string using JavaScript is below:
Code Output:
Full Code:
Remove first and last characters
Hopefully this article has been helpful for you to learn how to remove the first and last character from a string in JavaScript.