How to do this string manipulation in javascript?

You can use str.indexOf("Phone"); to get the index of the world Phone, then do a substring from the start to the position you just found, it will return you everything before phone !

Assuming that the dash will always be present, you could use:

var str = '170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States - Phone: 408-526-4000 Website:'; str = str.split('-').shift(); 

You could actually split on 'Phone' just as easily though:

var str = '170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States - Phone: 408-526-4000 Website:'; str = str.split('Phone').shift(); 

This:

var string = '170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States - Phone: 408-526-4000 Website:'; string = string.substr(0,string.indexOf('Phone')); alert(string); 

-substr is short for substring and works like this substring(being, end)

-indexOf finds the first occurence of the string provided.

One (different from the other answer) possibility would be to use Regular Expressions - this way, you are also flexible, should the text before the word Phone change in length. You need to:

• find the cut position in the string = you want to take the text up to this position
• cut the string using the string.substring method or string.slice

The code that uses regular expressions can look like this:

var input = "170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States - Phone: 408-526-4000 Website:"; var regExPattern = /Phone:/; // the expression that is matched against var cutPosition = input.search(regExPattern); // find the start position of the word by searching a match if (cutPosition != -1) { var text = input.substring(0, input.search(regExPattern)); // do something with the text } 

IMO using regular expressions in this case could make the task easier - there is also the option to remove the text (starting from Phone:) at once in one line using the string.replace method:

var input = "170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States - Phone: 408-526-4000 Website:"; var regExPattern = /Phone:.*/; // the expression that is matched against - now it is Phone: and everything after var text = input.replace(regExPattern, ""); // replace Phone: and everything after with empty string // do something with text 

assumption: the text Phone: is always present!

console.log("170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States - Phone: 408-526-4000 Website:".substring(0,56)) 

gives

170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 United States -