Bracket Notation

Understanding strings as sequential collections of characters gives us much more than just a mental model of how they are structured. JavaScript provides a rich collection of tools—including special syntax and operations—that allows us to work with strings.

Bracket notation is the special syntax that allows us to access the individual characters that make up a string. To access a character, we use the syntax someString[i], where i is the index of the character we want to access. String indices are integers representing the position of a character within a given string, and they start at 0. Thus, the first character of a string has index 0, the second has index 1, and so on.

Consider the string "JavaScript". The "J" has index 0, the first "a" has index 1, "v" has index 2, and so on.

An expression of the form someString[i] gives the character at index i.

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let jsCreator = "Brendan Eich";
let firstInitial = jsCreator[0];
let lastInitial = jsCreator[8];

let outputStr = "JavaScript was created by somebody with initials " + 
   firstInitial + "." +
   lastInitial + ".";

console.log(outputStr);

JavaScript was created by somebody with initials B.E.

What happens if we try to access an index that doesn’t exist, for example -1 or an index larger than the length of the string?

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let jsCreator = "Brendan Eich";

console.log(jsCreator[-1]);
console.log(jsCreator[42]);

Check Your Understanding

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let phrase = "JavaScript rocks!";
console.log(phrase[phrase.length - 8]);