JavaScript - remove first 2 characters from string

In JavaScript, it is possible to remove the first 2 characters from the string in the following ways.

1. Using String slice() method

// ONLINE-RUNNER:browser;

var text = '12345';
var substring = text.slice(2);

console.log(substring); // 345

In the second example, we can see that we can also use a string slice on the empty or shorter string than 2 characters (or in case we want to remove n characters from our string).

// ONLINE-RUNNER:browser;

// true means string is empty
console.log(''.slice(2) === ''); // empty
console.log('1'.slice(2) === ''); // empty
console.log('12'.slice(2) === ''); // empty
console.log('123'.slice(2)); // 3
console.log('1234'.slice(2)); // 34
console.log('12345'.slice(2)); // 345

We use ''.slice(2) === '' to see that the string after the slice operation is empty.

An empty result means that string was shorter than 2 characters or the length was exactly 2 characters and our string is empty (the length of the string is 0).

Because string slice returns string then we can also call string length method to check the size of the returned string, like on below example:

// ONLINE-RUNNER:browser;

console.log(''.slice(2) === ''); // empty
console.log(''.slice(2).length); // 0

2. Using String substring() method

// ONLINE-RUNNER:browser;

var text = '1234';
var substring = text.substring(2);

console.log(substring); // 34

3. Using String replace() method

// ONLINE-RUNNER:browser;

var text = '1234';
var substring = text.replace(/.{2}/, '');

console.log(substring); // 34