I am coming from a python background and do not understand this, is there a way in javascript to get the last 2nd element of a string?
eg const name = "John"
the closest i could find is name.slice(-2) but it return two characters, in other words, including the last character as well, which is not want i want.
JS's slice isn't that similar to Python's slice syntax in spite of the name similarity. JS's slice with a single argument always goes from the provided number to the end of the string or array unless you specify a stop index as
well (inclusive, exclusive):
const name = "John";
console.log(name.slice(-2, -1));
console.log(name[name.length-2]); // or use a normal index since you want 1 charStrings in JavaScript are arrays. For example, you can get the letter "h" in the word "John" by doing name[2].
In this case, we can use the .length property of an array to get the amount of elements in that array, and then subtract 2 to get the second last element in it. Like so:
let name = "John"
let secondLast = name[name.length - 2]
console.log(secondLast)Subtracting 2, because the length of an array is a count, starts from 1, but array indexes are starting from 0. And we need the second last letter, not the last one.
The slice() function takes two arguments, start and end. You can also index it like an array.
So you could write:
const name = "John"
console.log(name.slice(-2,-1))
console.log(name[name.length-2])