Remove the First Word from a String in JavaScript

Remove the First Word from a String #

To remove the first word from a string, call the indexOf() method to get the index of the first space in the string. Then use the substring() method to get a portion of the string, with the first word removed.

Copied!
function removeFirstWord(str) {
  const indexOfSpace = str.indexOf(' ');

  if (indexOfSpace === -1) {
    return '';
  }

  return str.substring(indexOfSpace + 1);
}

console.log(removeFirstWord('Hello World')); // 👉️ World
console.log(removeFirstWord('hello')); // 👉️ ''
console.log(removeFirstWord('one two three')); // 👉️ two three

We created a reusable function that removes the first word from a string.

We used the String.indexOf method to get the index of the first space in the string.

If the substring is not contained in the string, the method returns -1.

To cover the scenario where the string contains a single word (no spaces), we check if the indexOf method returns -1, and if it does, we return an empty string.

Copied!
function removeFirstWord(str) {
  const indexOfSpace = str.indexOf(' ');

  return str.substring(indexOfSpace + 1);
}

console.log(removeFirstWord('Hello World')); // 👉️ World
console.log(removeFirstWord('hello')); // 👉️ 'hello'
console.log(removeFirstWord('one two three')); // 👉️ two three

The last step is to use the String.substring method to get a portion of the string without the first word.

We don't want to include the space in the new string, so we add 1 to the index of the space.

The String.substring method doesn't change the original string, it returns a new string. Strings are immutable in JavaScript.

Further Reading #

• Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word in Array in JS
• Remove the Last Word from a String using JavaScript