How do I split a string into an array of characters? [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can use the regular expression /(?!$)/:

"overpopulation".split(/(?!$)/)

The negative look-ahead assertion (?!$) will match right in front of every character.

Answer 2

It's as simple as:

s.split("");

The delimiter is an empty string, hence it will break up between each single character.

Answer 3

A string in Javascript is already a character array.

You can simply access any character in the array as you would any other array.

var s = "overpopulation";
alert(s[0]) // alerts o.

UPDATE

As is pointed out in the comments below, the above method for accessing a character in a string is part of ECMAScript 5 which certain browsers may not conform to.

An alternative method you can use is charAt(index).

var s = "overpopulation";
    alert(s.charAt(0)) // alerts o.

Answer 4

The split() method in javascript accepts two parameters: a separator and a limit. The separator specifies the character to use for splitting the string. If you don't specify a separator, the entire string is returned, non-separated. But, if you specify the empty string as a separator, the string is split between each character.

Therefore:

s.split('')

will have the effect you seek.

More information here

Answer 5

Old question but I should warn:

Do NOT use .split('')

You'll get weird results with non-BMP (non-Basic-Multilingual-Plane) character sets.

Reason is that methods like .split() and .charCodeAt() only respect the characters with a code point below 65536; bec. higher code points are represented by a pair of (lower valued) "surrogate" pseudo-characters.

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Answer 6

.split('') would split emojis in half.

Onur's solutions and the regex's proposed work for some emojis, but can't handle more complex languages or combined emojis. Consider this emoji being ruined:

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