String.prototype.codePointAt()

The codePointAt() method returns a non-negative integer that is the Unicode code point value.

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Syntax

str.codePointAt(pos)

Parameters

pos

Position of an element in the String to return the code point value from.

Return value

A number representing the code point value of the character at the given index; undefined if there is no element at pos.

Description

If there is no element at the specified position, undefined is returned. If no UTF-16 surrogate pair begins at pos, the code unit at pos is returned.

Examples

Using codePointAt()

'ABC'.codePointAt(1);          // 66
'\uD800\uDC00'.codePointAt(0); // 65536

'XYZ'.codePointAt(42); // undefined

Looping with codePointAt()

for (let codePoint of '\ud83d\udc0e\ud83d\udc71\u2764') {
   console.log(codePoint.codePointAt(0).toString(16)) } // '1f40e', '1f471', '2764'  

Polyfill

The following extends Strings to include the codePointAt() function as specified in ECMAScript 2015 for browsers not supporting it natively.

/*! https://mths.be/codepointat v0.2.0 by @mathias */
if (!String.prototype.codePointAt) {
  (function() {
    'use strict'; // needed to support `apply`/`call` with `undefined`/`null`
    var defineProperty = (function() {
      // IE 8 only supports `Object.defineProperty` on DOM elements
      try {
        var object = {};
        var $defineProperty = Object.defineProperty;
        var result = $defineProperty(object, object, object) && $defineProperty;
      } catch(error) {}
      return result;
    }());
    var codePointAt = function(position) {
      if (this == null) {
        throw TypeError();
      }
      var string = String(this);
      var size = string.length;
      // `ToInteger`
      var index = position ? Number(position) : 0;
      if (index != index) { // better `isNaN`
        index = 0;
      }
      // Account for out-of-bounds indices:
      if (index < 0 || index >= size) {
        return undefined;
      }
      // Get the first code unit
      var first = string.charCodeAt(index);
      var second;
      if ( // check if it’s the start of a surrogate pair
        first >= 0xD800 && first <= 0xDBFF && // high surrogate
        size > index + 1 // there is a next code unit
      ) {
        second = string.charCodeAt(index + 1);
        if (second >= 0xDC00 && second <= 0xDFFF) { // low surrogate
          // https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding#surrogate-formulae
          return (first - 0xD800) * 0x400 + second - 0xDC00 + 0x10000;
        }
      }
      return first;
    };
    if (defineProperty) {
      defineProperty(String.prototype, 'codePointAt', {
        'value': codePointAt,
        'configurable': true,
        'writable': true
      });
    } else {
      String.prototype.codePointAt = codePointAt;
    }
  }());
}

Specifications

Browser compatibility

The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.

See also

• String.fromCodePoint()
• String.fromCharCode()
• String.prototype.charCodeAt()
• String.prototype.charAt()