If you have the need to uppercase just the first letter of a string in JavaScript like I did, just keep reading this article, because this is for you. There are multiple ways to achieve this, so I’ll try to document them the best way I can.

The quick and dirtiest way, uses three common functions and basically selects the first letter and makes it uppercase, while leaving the rest untouched.

const greet = 'hello world!'
const greetCapitalized = greet.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + greet.slice(1)

What this does is basically isolate the first letter of the string, h in this case and transform it into an uppercase H with the help of .toUpperCase(). After this is done, we need to concatenate with the rest of the string using .slice() . Notice that we start on position 1 instead of position 0, and this is basically because position 0 is the h , its actually the first letter.

The expression above could be translated to this:

const greetCapitalized = 'H' + 'ello world!'

If you need to use this logic multiple times, the best way would be to create a a function and keep reusing it everywhere you need it.

const capitalize = function (s) {
  if (typeof s !== 'string') return ''
  return s[0].toUpperCase() + s.slice(1)
}

capitalize('hello world!') // 'Hello world!'
capitalize('h') // 'F'
capitalize(0) // ''
capitalize({}) // ''

In this function you can notice that I used s[0] instead of s.charAt(0) but use this only if you are not targeting older versions of IE.