How to Get a Character Array From a JavaScript String?

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Sometimes, we want to get a character array from a string.

In this article, we’ll look at how to get a character array from a string.

A string instance’s split method lets us split a string by any separator.

If we want to get a character array from a string, we can use the split method with an empty string.

For instance, we can write:

const output = "Hello world!".split('');
console.log(output);

Then output is:

["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "w", "o", "r", "l", "d", "!"]

as a result.

Another way to split a string into a character array is the spread operator.

We can do this since a string is an iterable object.

To use it, we write:

const output = [..."Hello world!"]
console.log(output);

Then we get the same value for output as before.

We can also use the string split method with a regex to split a string into a character array.

For instance, we can write:

const output = "Hello world!".split(/(?=[sS])/u);
console.log(output);

s matches any whitespace and S matches any non-whitespace character.

And the /u flag lets us do searches with Unicode strings properly.

?= is the followed by quantifier.

So we search for anything that follows a whitespace or non-whitespace character and split them.

And so we get the same result as before.

Since a string is an iterable object, we can for use the for-of loop to loop through each character.

For instance, we can write:

const output = [];
for (const s of "Hello world!") {
  output.push(s);
}
console.log(output);

s has the character from the string.

In the loop body, we call output.push to push character s into the output array.

So we get the same result as before.

The Array.from method is a static array method that lets us convert an iterable object into an array.

So we can use it to convert a string into a character array.

For example, we can write:

const output = Array.from("Hello world!")
console.log(output);

And we get the same value for output as before.

There’re many ways to convert a JavaScript string into a character array.

This includes array methods, spread operator, and loops.

By John Au-Yeung