How do I check if string contains substring?

Jordan Garis picture Jordan Garis · Aug 13, 2010 · Viewed 1.7M times · Source

I have a shopping cart that displays product options in a dropdown menu and if they select "yes", I want to make some other fields on the page visible.

The problem is that the shopping cart also includes the price modifier in the text, which can be different for each product. The following code works:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('select[id="Engraving"]').change(function() {
        var str = $('select[id="Engraving"] option:selected').text();
        if (str == "Yes (+ $6.95)") {
            $('.engraving').show();
        } else {
            $('.engraving').hide();
        }
    });
});

However I would rather use something like this, which doesn't work:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('select[id="Engraving"]').change(function() {
        var str = $('select[id="Engraving"] option:selected').text();
        if (str *= "Yes") {
            $('.engraving').show();
        } else {
            $('.engraving').hide();
        }
    });
});

I only want to perform the action if the selected option contains the word "Yes", and would ignore the price modifier.

Answer

SLaks picture SLaks · Aug 13, 2010

Like this:

if (str.indexOf("Yes") >= 0)

...or you can use the tilde operator:

if (~str.indexOf("Yes"))

This works because indexOf() returns -1 if the string wasn't found at all.

Note that this is case-sensitive.
If you want a case-insensitive search, you can write

if (str.toLowerCase().indexOf("yes") >= 0)

Or:

if (/yes/i.test(str))