The String in JavaScript can be converted to an Array in 5 different ways. We will make use of split, Array.from, spread, Object.assign and for loop. Let's discuss all the methods in brief.
1. The split() method
This method is used to split a string based on a separator provided and returns an Array of substrings.
let str = 'Tiger,Horse,Elephant,Wolf';
let arr = str.split(',');
//split string by comma
console.log(arr);
//["Tiger", "Horse", "Elephant", "Wolf"]
If you want to split the string by each character, then you can specify an empty string (“”) as the separator.
let str = 'jscurious';
let arr = str.split('');
console.log(arr);
// ["j", "s", "c", "u", "r", "i", "o", "u", "s"]
The split() method accepts a second optional argument which sets the limit on the splits. This limit value decides how many elements will be included in the returned array.
let str = 'Cricket | Hockey | Football | Tennis';
let arr = str.split(' | ', 2);
console.log(arr);
// ['Cricket', 'Hockey']
2. The Array.from() method
The Array.from() method returns an Array from any iterable object. We can pass a string value in from() method to get a character array.
let str = 'jscurious';
let arr = Array.from(str);
console.log(arr);
// ["j", "s", "c", "u", "r", "i", "o", "u", "s"]
This method also accepts two optional arguments. One is a map function to call on each element of the array and the other one is a value to use as this while executing the map function.
let str = 'jscurious';
let arr = Array.from(str, (val, index) => val + index);
// adding index value to each element of array
console.log(arr);
// ["j0", "s1", "c2", "u3", "r4", "i5", "o6", "u7", "s8"]
3. The spread operator
The spread operator (…) extracts and spreads each character of a String. We can just wrap all those characters inside an array literal to create a new array from the string.
let str = 'jscurious';
let arr = [...str];
console.log(arr);
// ["j", "s", "c", "u", "r", "i", "o", "u", "s"]
4. The Object.assign() method
This method is used to copy the values and properties from one or more source objects to a target object. We can provide a string as the source and an empty array as the target to create an array from the string.
let str = 'jscurious';
let arr = Object.assign([], str);
console.log(arr);
// ["j", "s", "c", "u", "r", "i", "o", "u", "s"]
5. The For loop
We can loop through each character of a string using for loop and push that character to an empty array to create an array from the string.
let str = 'jscurious';
let arr = [];
for(let i of str) {
arr.push(i);
}
console.log(arr);
// ["j", "s", "c", "u", "r", "i", "o", "u", "s"]
That's it for this topic. Thank you for reading.