Get first and rest of string from comma separated values in Javascript

Given a string like this:

"boy, girl, dog, cat"

What would be a good way to get the first word and the rest of them, so I could have this:

var first_word = "boy";
var rest = "girl, dog, cat";

Right now I have this:

my_string.split(","); But that gives me all the words that are between the commas.

Solution 1:

You can use both split and splice:

var str = "boy, girl, dog, cat";
var arr = str.split(",");
var fst = arr.splice(0,1).join("");
var rest = arr.join(",");

Or similar

// returns an array with the extracted str as first value
// and the rest as second value
function cutFirst(str,token){
   var arr = str.split(token);
   var fst = arr.splice(0,1);
   return [fst.join(""),arr.join(token)];
}

Solution 2:

Use a combination of substring() (returning the substring between two indexes or the end of the string) and indexOf() (returning the first position of a substring within another string):

var input = "boy, girl, dog, cat",
    pos = input.indexOf( ',' );

console.log( input.substring( 0, pos ) );
console.log( input.substring( pos + 1 ) );

Maybe you want to add an trim() call to the results to remove whitespaces.