How to find unique characters of a string in JavaScript ?

The purpose of this article is to find unique characters in a string using JavaScript. We have a few methods to find unique characters in a string using JavaScript which are described below.

Example:

Input:  Geeksforgeeks
Output: Geksforg

Input:  Geeksforgeeks is a great site for computer science
Output: Geksforg Iaticmpun

To achieve this, we have the following approaches:

Approach 1: This is a naive approach to find the unique characters from a string. In this approach, we create a variable name uniq and we are iterating over the string using the for loop and at every iteration, we are checking if the uniq contains the character.

Example: This example shows the above-explained approach.

Javascript

<script>
    function findUnique(str){
      // The variable that contains the unique values
      let uniq = "";

      for(let i = 0; i < str.length; i++){
        // Checking if the uniq contains the character
        if(uniq.includes(str[i]) === false){
          // If the character not present in uniq
          // Concatenate the character with uniq
          uniq += str[i]
        }
      }
      return uniq;
    }

    console.log(findUnique("Geeksforgeeks"))
    console.log(findUnique("Geeksforgeeks Is a great site for computer science"))
</script>

Output:

"Geksforg"

"Geksforg Iaticmpun"

Approach 2: In this method, we use the set data structure. The set data structure contains only unique values, and we take the advantage of it. So to extract the unique values from the string using Set we follow the steps below.

• Using the split() method convert the string into an array.
• Create a Set using new Set() and pass the converted array into it.
• Now convert the set into an array using the spread operator e.g: […set]
• And then join that array to make a string.

Example: This example shows the above-explained approach.

Javascript

<script>
    // Javascript program to extract unique characters from a string
    function findUnique(str){

      // Split the string to make array
      str = str.split("")

      // Create a set using array
      str = new Set(str);

      // Convert the set into array using spread
      // operator and join it to make string
      str = [...str].join("");

      return str;
    }


    console.log(findUnique("Geeksforgeeks"))
    console.log(findUnique("Geeksforgeeks Is a great site for computer science"))
</script>

Output:

"Geksforg"

"Geksforg Iaticmpun"

Approach 3: In this approach first, we convert the string into an array using the spread operator e.g. […str] and then we apply the reduce method on that array. 

Example: This example shows the above-explained approach.

Javascript

<script>
    // Javascript program to extract unique characters from a string
    function findUnique(str){
      return [...str].reduce((acc, curr)=>{
        return acc.includes(curr) ?  acc  :  acc + curr;
      }, "")
    }


    console.log(findUnique("Geeksforgeeks"))
    console.log(findUnique("Geeksforgeeks Is a great site for computer science"))
</script>

Output:

"Geksforg"
"Geksforg Iaticmpun"

Approach-4: In this approach, we will use a for-loop in order to iterate over the complete string and then by using the indexOf() method we will check the index of each and every character (using charAt() method) of the string which is either repeated or not repeated and then in an empty string (which we will declare initially) we will store all the unique characters.

Example: This example shows the above-explained approach.

Javascript

<script>
    // JavaScript code for the above approach...

    let uniqueCharacters = (stringg) => {
      let unique_characters = "";
      for (let i = 0; i < stringg.length; i++) {
     if (unique_characters.indexOf(stringg.charAt(i)) < 0) {
       unique_characters += stringg.charAt(i);
     }
      }
      return unique_characters;
    };

    console.log(uniqueCharacters("Geeksforgeeks"));
</script>

Output:

Geksforg