JavaScript provides several ways to access individual characters in a string.

charAt()

Returns the character at the specified index:

'Flavio'.charAt(0) //'F'
'Flavio'.charAt(1) //'l'
'Flavio'.charAt(2) //'a'

If you give an index that doesn’t match the string, you get an empty string.

JavaScript doesn’t have a “char” type, so a char is a string of length 1.

Bracket Notation

You can also use bracket notation to access characters (not supported in older IE versions):

'Flavio'[0] //'F'
'Flavio'[1] //'l'

charCodeAt()

Returns the Unicode 16-bit integer representing the character at the specified index:

'Flavio'.charCodeAt(0) //70
'Flavio'.charCodeAt(1) //108
'Flavio'.charCodeAt(2) //97

Calling toString(16) after that returns the hexadecimal value, which you can look up in Unicode tables.

codePointAt()

Introduced in ES2015 to handle Unicode characters that cannot be represented by a single 16-bit Unicode unit.

Using charCodeAt() with characters that need 2 UTF-16 units requires retrieving both and combining them. codePointAt() gets the whole character in one call.

For example, this Chinese character ”𠮷” is composed of 2 UTF-16 parts:

"𠮷".charCodeAt(0).toString(16) //d842
"𠮷".charCodeAt(1).toString(16) //dfb7

If you create a new character by combining those Unicode characters:

"\ud842\udfb7" //"𠮷"

You can get the same result using codePointAt():

"𠮷".codePointAt(0) //20bb7

And create the character using the Unicode code point:

"\u{20bb7}" //"𠮷"

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	String Basics
2:	▶︎ Accessing Characters
3:	Searching Strings
4:	Extracting Substrings
5:	Transforming Strings
6:	Modifying Strings
7:	Trimming and Padding
8:	String Recipes
9:	Unicode and UTF-8
10:	Printable ASCII characters list
11:	Non-printable ASCII characters list