Split string on the first white space occurence

If you only care about the space character (and not tabs or other whitespace characters) and only care about everything before the first space and everything after the first space, you can do it without a regular expression like this: var str = "Hello India Jai Hind"; str.substr(0,str.indexOf(' ')); // "Hello" str.substr(str.indexOf(' ')+1); // "India Jai Hind" Note that if there is no space at all, then the first line will return an empty string and the second line will return the entire string. Be sure that is the behavior that you want in that situation (or that that situation will not arise).