Get a range of characters (Functional ES6 JavaScript)

Bret Lowrey

Aug 13, 2016 • 1 min read

It can be useful to grab every character in order from the alphabet when you are coding sometimes. For example, if you wanted to display a ordinal list by letters, like a mulitple choice test. Some languages give this to you out of the box (Perl, Ruby) but JavaScript is not one of them.

Here is a short function I wrote that will return a list of the characters given a starting and end point. I use the range function I detailed in an early entry.

const rangeAlpha = (start, stop)  => {
    start = start.charCodeAt(0);
    stop = stop.charCodeAt(0);
    return range(start, stop + 1).map(code => String.fromCharCode(code));
};

Here's the JSFiddle to see it in action.

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