How can I process each letter of text using Javascript?

I would like to alert each letter of a string, but I am unsure how to do this.

So, if I have:

var str = 'This is my string';

I would like to be able to separately alert T, h, i, s, etc. This is just the beginning of an idea that I am working on, but I need to know how to process each letter separately.

I was thinking I might need to use the split function after testing what the length of the string is.

How can I do this?

Solution 1:

If the order of alerts matters, use this:

for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
  alert(str.charAt(i));
}

Or this: (see also this answer)

 for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
   alert(str[i]);
 }

If the order of alerts doesn't matter, use this:

var i = str.length;
while (i--) {
  alert(str.charAt(i));
}

Or this: (see also this answer)

 var i = str.length;
while (i--) {
  alert(str[i]);
}

var str = 'This is my string';

function matters() {
  for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    alert(str.charAt(i));
  }
}

function dontmatter() {
  var i = str.length;
  while (i--) {
    alert(str.charAt(i));
  }
}

<p>If the order of alerts matters, use <a href="#" onclick="matters()">this</a>.</p>

<p>If the order of alerts doesn't matter, use <a href="#" onclick="dontmatter()">this</a>.</p>

Solution 2:

It's probably more than solved. Just want to contribute with another simple solution:

var text = 'uololooo';

// With ES6
[...text].forEach(c => console.log(c))

// With the `of` operator
for (const c of text) {
    console.log(c)
}

// With ES5
for (var x = 0, c=''; c = text.charAt(x); x++) { 
    console.log(c); 
}

// ES5 without the for loop:
text.split('').forEach(function(c) {
    console.log(c);
});

Solution 3:

How to process each letter of text (with benchmarks)

~~https://jsperf.com/str-for-in-of-foreach-map-2~~

for

Classic and by far the one with the most performance. You should go with this one if you are planning to use it in a performance critical algorithm, or that it requires the maximum compatibility with browser versions.

for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
  console.info(str[i]);
}

for...of

for...of is the new ES6 for iterator. Supported by most modern browsers. It is visually more appealing and is less prone to typing mistakes. If you are going for this one in a production application, you should be probably using a transpiler like Babel.

let result = '';
for (let letter of str) {
  result += letter;
}

forEach

Functional approach. Airbnb approved. The biggest downside of doing it this way is the split(), that creates a new array to store each individual letter of the string.

Why? This enforces our immutable rule. Dealing with pure functions that return values is easier to reason about than side effects.

// ES6 version.
let result = '';
str.split('').forEach(letter => {
  result += letter;
});

var result = '';
str.split('').forEach(function(letter) {
  result += letter;
});

The following are the ones I dislike.

for...in

Unlike for...of, you get the letter index instead of the letter. It performs pretty badly.

var result = '';
for (var letterIndex in str) {
  result += str[letterIndex];
}

map

Function approach, which is good. However, map isn't meant to be used for that. It should be used when needing to change the values inside an array, which is not the case.

// ES6 version.
var result = '';
str.split('').map(letter => {
  result += letter;
});

let result = '';
str.split('').map(function(letter) {
  result += letter;
});