How to check if a string “StartsWith” another string?

Question

How would I write the equivalent of C#\'s String.StartsWith in JavaScript?

var haystack = \'hello world\';
var needle = \'he\';

haystack.startsWith(needle)          


        

Answer 1

Another alternative with .lastIndexOf:

haystack.lastIndexOf(needle, 0) === 0

This looks backwards through haystack for an occurrence of needle starting from index 0 of haystack. In other words, it only checks if haystack starts with needle.

In principle, this should have performance advantages over some other approaches:

• It doesn't search the entire haystack.
• It doesn't create a new temporary string and then immediately discard it.