Removing first and last character from a string in JavaScript

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to remove the first and last character from a string in JavaScript.

Consider we have a string like this and we need to remove the slashes from both sides.

let str = '/hello/';

Using slice method

To remove the first and last character from a string, we need to specify the two arguments in slice method which are startIndex and endIndex.

let str = '/hello/';

//slice starts from index 1 and ends before last index
console.log(str.slice(1,-1));

//output --> 'hello'

Note: Negative index -1 is equivalent to str.length-1 in slice method.

Using substring method

The substring() method also works similar like slice method but in substring negative indexes are treated as 0 so that we need to use str.length-1 to get the endIndex.

let str = '/hello/';

console.log(str.substring(1,str.length-1));

//output --> 'hello'

Using both slice and substring methods

Now we are chaining the both slice() and substring() methods to remove the first and last character from a string.

let str = '/hello/';

console.log(str.substring(1).slice(0,-1));

//output --> 'hello'

In the above code, we first remove the first character from a string using substring() method then we chain it to slice() method to remove the last character.

Using replace method

The replace method takes two arguments, the first argument is a regular expression and the second argument is replacement.

Example:

let str = '/hello/';

console.log(str.replace(/^(.)|(.)$/g,''));

//output --> 'hello'