Get the last N characters of a String in JavaScript

Get the last N characters of a String #

To get the last N characters of a string, call the slice method on the string, passing in -n as a parameter, e.g. str.slice(-3) returns a new string containing the last 3 characters of the original string.

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const str = 'Hello World';

const last3 = str.slice(-3); // 👉️ rld
console.log(last3);

const last2 = str.slice(-2); // 👉️ ld
console.log(last2);

The parameter we passed to the String.slice method is the start index.

This is the same as passing string.length - 3 as the start index.

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const str = 'Hello World';

const last3 = str.slice(-3); // 👉️ rld
console.log(last3);

const last3Again = str.slice(str.length - 3); // 👉️ rld
console.log(last3Again);

In both examples, we tell the slice method to copy the last 3 characters of the string into a new string.

Even if we try to get more characters than the string contains, String.slice won't throw an error, instead it returns a new string containing all characters.

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const str = 'Hello World';

const last100 = str.slice(-100); // 👉️ Hello World
console.log(last100);

In the example we tried to get the last 100 characters of a string that only contains 11 characters.

As a result the slice method returned a copy of the entire string.

You could also use the String.substring method to get the last N characters of a string.

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const str = 'Hello World';

// 👇️ using substring
const last3 = str.substring(str.length - 3); // 👉️ rld
console.log(last3);

However, using the String.slice method is more intuitive and readable.

For other differences between String.substring and String.slice, check out the MDN docs.