I have a string, and I need to get its first character.

var x = 'somestring';
alert(x[0]); //in ie7 returns undefined

How can I fix my code?

What you want is charAt.

var x = 'some string';
alert(x.charAt(0)); // alerts 's'

In JavaScript you can do this:

const x = 'some string';
console.log(x.substring(0, 1));

You can use any of these.

There is a little difference between all of these So be careful while using it in conditional statement.

var string = "hello world";
console.log(string.slice(0,1));     //o/p:- h
console.log(string.charAt(0));      //o/p:- h
console.log(string.substring(0,1)); //o/p:- h
console.log(string.substr(0,1));    //o/p:- h
console.log(string[0]);             //o/p:- h


var string = "";
console.log(string.slice(0,1));     //o/p:- (an empty string)
console.log(string.charAt(0));      //o/p:- (an empty string)
console.log(string.substring(0,1)); //o/p:- (an empty string)
console.log(string.substr(0,1));    //o/p:- (an empty string)
console.log(string[0]);             //o/p:- undefined

Example of all method

First : string.charAt(index)

Return the caract at the index index

var str = "Stack overflow";

console.log(str.charAt(0));

Second : string.substring(start,length);

Return the substring in the string who start at the index start and stop after the length length

Here you only want the first caract so : start = 0 and length = 1

var str = "Stack overflow";

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

Alternative : string[index]

A string is an array of caract. So you can get the first caract like the first cell of an array.

Return the caract at the index index of the string

var str = "Stack overflow";

console.log(str[0]);

var x = "somestring"
alert(x.charAt(0));

The charAt() method allows you to specify the position of the character you want.

What you were trying to do is get the character at the position of an array “x”, which is not defined as X is not an array.

You can even use slice to cut-off all other characters:

x.slice(0, 1);

var str="stack overflow";

firstChar  = str.charAt(0);

secondChar = str.charAt(1);

Tested in IE6+, FF, Chrome, safari.

Try this as well:

x.substr(0, 1);

x.substring(0,1)

Details

substring(start, end) extracts the characters from a string, between the 2 indices “start” and “end”, not including “end” itself.

Special notes

• If “start” is greater than “end”, this method will swap the two arguments, meaning str.substring(1, 4) == str.substring(4, 1).
• If either “start” or “end” is less than 0, it is treated as if it were 0.

Looks like I am late to the party, but try the below solution which I personally found the best solution:

var x = "testing sub string"
alert(x[0]);
alert(x[1]);

Output should show alert with below values: “t” “e”

in Nodejs you can use Buffer :

let str = "hello world"
let buffer = Buffer.alloc(2, str) // replace 2 by 1 for the first char
console.log(buffer.toString('utf-8')) // display he
console.log(buffer.toString('utf-8').length) // display 2

you can use in this way:

'Hello Mr Been'.split(' ').map( item => item.toUpperCase().substring(0, 1)).join(' ');

var string  = "Hello World";
console.log(charAt(0));

The charAt(0) is JavaScript method, It will return value based on index, here 0 is the index for first letter.

It’s been 10 years yet no answer mentioned RegExp.

var x = 'somestring';
console.log(x.match(/./)[0]);

in JQuery you can use: in class for Select Option:

$('.className').each(function(){
    className.push($("option:selected",this).val().substr(1));
});

in class for text Value:

$('.className').each(function(){
    className.push($(this).val().substr(1));
});

in ID for text Value:

$("#id").val().substr(1)