JavaScript access string chars as array

Question

Is it ok to do this:

var myString="Hello!"; alert(myString[0]); // shows "H" in an alert window 

Or should it be done with either charAt(0) or substr(0,1)? By "is it ok" I mean will it work on most browsers, is there a best practice recommandation that says otherwise etc.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Accessing characters as numeric properties of a string is non-standard prior to ECMAScript 5 and doesn't work in all browsers (for example, it doesn't work in IE 6 or 7). You should use myString.charAt(0) instead when your code has to work in non-ECMAScript 5 environments. Alternatively, if you're going to be accessing a lot of characters in the string then you can turn a string into an array of characters using its split() method:

var myString = "Hello!"; var strChars = myString.split(""); alert(strChars[0]); 

Answer 2

Using charAt is probably the best idea since it conveys the intent of your code most accurately. Calling substr for a single character is definitely an overkill.

alert(myString.charAt(0));