New JavaScript String Capabilities to Simplify Code

Cleaner Text Handling with Template Literals & More

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

Working with strings represents one of the most common tasks in programming. JavaScript includes excellent text processing capabilities, but string manipulation traditionally required messy concatenation and unintuitive APIs.

With a host of new language features, text wrangling now proves cleaner than ever. Let’s see how modern JavaScript unlocks more eloquent string handling.

Template Literals Overview

Template literals provide an intuitive syntax for composing strings spanning multiple lines, while interpolated expressions seamlessly embed values:

const name = 'Seth';

const message = `Hello ${name}, 

  Welcome to the Future of JavaScript!
  
  Sincerely,
    Your Friend`;

console.log(message);

// Hello Seth,
//
//   Welcome to the Future of JavaScript! 
//   
//   Sincerely,
//     Your Friend

Huge improvements over manual concatenation, whitespace control, and substitution!

Simpler String Interpolation

In addition to multiline clarity, template literals simplify variable insertion compared to concatenation:

const prev = 'Hello '…