JavaScript 3 ways of Check subString contains in a string

JavaScript 3 ways of Check subString contains in a string

Multiple ways to check string contains substring in javascript

How to find if a substring exists in a given string in Javascript

String checking operations is an operation every developer needs to know.
In this blog post, I will take you through several ways of checking whether a substring exists in a given string in JavaScript.

  • ES5 String indexOf() method, that returns index if found, else -1.
  • Inbuilt String search() method, returns positional index if found, else return -1
  • Using ES6 String includes() method, that returns true if found, else false.

How to Check if a substring exists in a string ES5 String indexOf method

Before ES6, the indexOf method was used to check the substring presence in the main string. It returns -1 if the string is not found, or else the positional index of the first occurrence of a given substring.
Syntax:

String.indexOf(substring);

Input and return values

  • input is given substring to check the presence
  • returns number -1 or greater than 0.

Example:

let mainString = "String checking indexOf example";
console.log(mainString.indexOf("checking")); // 7
console.log(mainString.indexOf("asdfad")); // -1

Let’s see one more example in conditional if the expression.

if ("first string".indexOf("string") == -1) {
  console.log("not found");
} else {
  console.log("found");
}

From the above example, code looks not human readable, and conditional expression always needs an extra check against integers instead of simply true or false values. So check integer values if the conditional expression is disadvantaged.

How to Check if a substring exists in a String javascript Search with regular expression

It is one more way of checking string exists or not.

It checks the regular expression against a given string object and returns the positional index, else not found, returns -1.
Syntax

String.search(regular expression)

the return type is an index of matched starting positions.
input accepted is a regular expression.

let string = "search string example";
console.log(string.search("string") !== -1); // true
console.log(string.search("string") !== -1); // true
console.log(string.search("string")); // outputs 7

The disadvantage is regular expression processing takes more time and resources, It is not advisable to use this for simple use cases.

How to Check if a substring exists using ES6 String includes a method

ES6 is a new JavaScript feature introduced in 2015 year. The string includes() a new method that returns true if a given substring contains in a string. Syntax

String.includes(substring, index);

Parameters

  • substring - This is string text which checks for existence in a given string
  • index - starting position at which checking starts, and optional
  • Returns true - if substring found false - not found in a given string Here is an example.
const message = "Substring checking example";

console.log(message.includes("example")); // true
console.log(message.includes("aserwerew")); // false
console.log(message.includes("as", 8)); // false
console.log(message.includes("string", 3)); // true