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Split a String into a List of Words in JavaScript or Node.js

You may want to split a JavaScript string into a list of words. JavaScript doesn’t provide a native words method. Yet, it comes with the necessary functionality to build this method yourself.

This tutorial shows you how to split a given JavaScript string into an array of words.

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The Straightforward Approach: Split on Spaces

JavaScript provides a split method that you may use to split a given string into an array of strings. A straightforward approach to split a given string at each space character is separating it into a list of words.

const words = 'Supercharge is awesome'.split(' ')  
// ['Supercharge', 'is', 'awesome']

The “split-at-space” approach works fine for most of the use cases. You can typically use it without problems in your application.

One drawback of this approach is that it doesn‘t appropriately split strings in camelCase/PascalCase format:

const words = 'SuperchargeIsAwesome'.split(' ')  
// ['SuperchargeIsAwesome']

Well, this example might be an edge case for your application. Don’t worry about it if you don‘t need to support.

The Solid Approach: Use the @supercharge/strings Package

I’m the maintainer of the @supercharge/strings package providing convenient string utilities. It provides a useful Str#words() method returning a list of words for a given string value. This words method also works nicely with long texts containing line breaks; camelCased, or PascalCased strings:

const Str = require('@supercharge/strings')

Str('Supercharge is awesome').words()  
// ['Supercharge', 'is', 'awesome']

Str('SuperchargeIsAwesome').words()  
// ['Supercharge', 'is', 'awesome']

Str('').words()  
// []

That’s it!

Mentioned Resources

Marcus Pöhls

Marcus is a fullstack JS developer. He’s passionate about the hapi framework for Node.js and loves to build web apps and APIs. Creator of Futureflix and the “learn hapi” learning path.

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