Characters of a Text

Text is not an array, but in some ways it works like one. Each character in a text has an index, counted from 0, and you can read it with square brackets:

const language = "JavaScript";
console.log(language[0]);
console.log(language[4]);

This prints:

J
S

Spaces and punctuation marks are characters too, so "Hi, Tom" has 7 characters. A text also has the length property: the number of its characters. The last character is therefore at index .length - 1, just like the last element of an array:

console.log(language.length);
console.log(language[language.length - 1]);

This prints:

10
t

There is one big difference, though: you can't change a character in a text. The code language[0] = "L"; does nothing. It doesn't cause an error, but the text stays "JavaScript". Once a text has been created, it can't be changed. You can only create a new text, for example by joining texts with +, or with one of the methods that texts have. The method toUpperCase() returns a new text in capital letters and leaves the original as it was:

language[0] = "L";
console.log(language);
const loud = language.toUpperCase();
console.log(loud);
console.log(language);

This prints:

JavaScript
JAVASCRIPT
JavaScript