JavaScript Essentials For Dummies

Chapter 8

Coding Strings and Dates

IN THIS CHAPTER

Stringing together strings

Dealing with dates

Tinkering with times

Although your JavaScript code will spend much of its time dealing with web page knickknacks such as HTML tags and CSS properties, it will also perform lots of behind-the-scenes chores that require manipulating strings and dealing with dates and times. To help you through these tasks, in this chapter you explore two of JavaScript’s built-in objects: the String object and the Date object. You investigate the most important properties of each object and master the most used methods.

Manipulating Strings

I’ve used dozens of examples of strings so far in this book. These include not only string literals (such as "JavaScript Essentials For Dummies") but also methods that return strings (such as the prompt() method). So, it should be clear by now that strings play a major role in all JavaScript programming, and it will be a rare script that doesn’t have to deal with strings in some fashion.

For this reason, it pays to become proficient at manipulating strings, which includes locating text within a string and extracting text from a string. You’ll find out about all that ...