Question

var s = "overpopulation";
var ar = [];
ar = s.split();
alert(ar);

I want to string.split a word into array of characters.

The above code doesn’t seem to work – it returns “overpopulation” as Object..

How do i split it into array of characters, if original string doesn’t contain commas and whitespace?

Answer 1

You can split on an empty string:

var chars = "overpopulation".split('');

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If you just want to access a string in an array-like fashion, you can do that without split:

var s = "overpopulation";
for (var i = 0; i < s.length; i++) {
    console.log(s.charAt(i));
}

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You can also access each character with its index using normal array syntax. Note, however, that strings are immutable, which means you can’t set the value of a character using this method, and that it isn’t supported by IE7 (if that still matters to you).

var s = "overpopulation";

console.log(s[3]); // logs 'r'