Welcome to another ES6: Features post. I think I might be getting to the end of this series soon! Anyway, this week's post is going to be on the new string related additions that have been made in Ecmascript 6. First up is a neww utility method called repeat(). As the name suggests, it duplicates a string a specified number of times:

> "e".repeat(10)
'eeeeeeeeee'
> "=-".repeat(4)
'=-=-=-=-'
> "Precarious Porcupine".repeat(3)
'Precarious PorcupinePrecarious PorcupinePrecarious Porcupine'

No more abusing new Array(length + 1).join(number)! It looks like one of those functions that should have been added a long time ago. As usual, the MDN has a polyfill that you can use.

Next up is a set of functions that make searching for things in strings much easier. There's startsWith, endsWidth and includes, and they all return a boolean:

"porcupine".startsWith("p"); // true
"porcupine".startsWith("pine", 5); // true

startsWith has an optional second argument, which lets you specify an offset from which to begin searching. endsWidth also has an optional second argument, but it lets you limit the number of characters that are searched:

"erroneous elephant".startsWith("waterfront"); // false
"erroneous elephant".endsWith("neous"); // false
"erroneous elephant".endsWith("neous", 9); // true

Lastly, there's includes. It works as you might expect it to, with the optional second argument specifying the offset from which to search:

"catastrophic crocodile".includes("croc"); // true
"catastrophic crocodile".includes("cat", 8); // false

This trio of functions should make complex string manipulation much easier to understand as you don't have to use any more complex indexOf tests anymore.

That concludes thsi ES6: Features post on strings. It seems that readability is a running theme throughout ES6. I hope that in time this makes everyone's javascript much easier to read and debug :)