Don’t string me along…

The next thing we should know about is strings. A piece of text in JavaScript is called a string. It’s a string of letters all attached together. We can tell it’s a string because it sits between quotation marks like this:

"I am a String";

Everything between the quotes is part of the string and will be treated by JavaScript as a piece of text, and not part of your program.

We can also use single quotes too, like so:

'I am a String';

We can add strings together to make longer strings using the plus character:

"Hi there " + "hello";

Alerting

If we need to know what’s inside a string we can find out using an alert box like so:

alert("Hi there " + "hello");

Add this to your script and press refresh. Nice!

One of the ways we can use strings is to help our program talk to our user. We saw this in the first example in the last section. We used an alert box to display the string “Hello JavaScript, your new best friend!“. Strings have a whole host of uses that we’ll come too soon.

console.log

We can also get data out using the console object. We write:

console.log('Hi from the console');

The console is a developer tool. On Windows you can open it by pressing F12. If you’re on Chrome you can right click, select inspect, then choose the console tab. You’ll be able to see all kinds of information about your program here and you’ll be using this a lot going forward.

Strings are objects

Objects are little balls of related data and functionality. We can access information stored in an object using a dot (.).

Let’s get the length of the string. We can do it like this:

"Allo allo allo".length;

We might even alert this:

alert("Allo allo allo".length);