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Can the first char of a string be retrieved by doing the following?

MyString.ToCharArray[0] 
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  • 4
    What did you learn when you tried it? Commented Oct 7, 2010 at 5:03
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    @Michael: There was a compiler error. How are you meant to use ToCharArray if not this way? Commented Oct 7, 2010 at 5:10
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    For the record, ToCharArray is a method, you should run it first, eg char[] chars = str.ToCharArray();, and then use char first = chars[0];. You can also butcher it into str.ToCharArray()[0];. Either way, make sure you check the string isn't null and has at least one character - you can do it using if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(str)). Commented Oct 7, 2010 at 5:13
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    Do you want the first char or the first character? If you try this and it seems to work, try again with 𣊾 or 𣇞, which both failed in a program I was using that was written in C# with this exact bug. Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 3:35
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    @hippietrail - thx, that got me reading to see if C# had any special built-in functions to deal with Unicode complexities. As best I could see, one would first call String.Normalize with a specified Normalization Form, to make the string easier to analyze, then write custom code to extract each Unicode codepoint, and determine which codepoints start a character, vs those that add diacritic marks or other control purposes. Also found stackoverflow.com/a/26977869/199364 which mentions some subtleties of the concept character. Commented Apr 8, 2017 at 18:53

15 Answers 15

476

Just MyString[0]. This uses the String.Chars indexer.

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69

Mystring[0] should be enough

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49

Try this:

string s1 = "good"; string s = s1.Substring(0,1); 

4 Comments

The difference between this answer and the chosen one is that this solution returns a string, and the other returns a char.
char get only one character but my solution can be result more than one if you want.
It was just a precision as the type can be of importance according to what you want to do with it.
You probably want to check that the string length is not 0.
27

You can use LINQ

char c = mystring.FirstOrDefault() 

It will be equal to '\0' if the string is empty.

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22

The difference between MyString[0] and MyString.ToCharArray()[0] is that the former treats the string as a read-only array, while ToCharArray() creates a new array. The former will be quicker (along with easier) for almost anything where it will work, but ToCharArray can be necessary if you have a method that needs to accept an array, or if you want to change the array.

If the string isn't known to be non-null and non-empty you could do:

string.IsNullOrEmpty(MyString) ? (char?)null : MyString[0] 

which returns a char? of either null or the first character in the string, as appropriate.

1 Comment

Thanks for mentioning char? as a way to include the possibility "there is no first character".
12

Just another approach:

string mystr = "hello"; MessageBox.show(mystr.Substring(0, 1)); 

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11

Or you can do this:

MyString[0]; 

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11

Starting with C# 8.0+ we can use the range indexer syntax.

The following code:

var name = "Dotnet".Substring(0, 1) 

can be written using range syntax:

var name = "Dotnet"[..1] 

Try it out in Dotnet fiddle

See official docs for more examples

The above code will throw if the input string is less than range index. This LINQ will prevent that problem:

var name = "Dotnet".Take(1).ToArray() 

Try it out in Dotnet fiddle

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6

I think you are looking for this MyString.ToCharArray()[0]

:)

But you can use MyString[0] too.

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3

Following example for getting first character from a string might help someone

string anyNameForString = "" + stringVariableName[0]; 

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1

In C# 8 you can use ranges.

myString[0..Math.Min(myString.Length, 1)] 

Add a ? after myString to handle null strings.

1 Comment

I believe that this returns string and not char which in my case is what I wanted, so thanks, but may not be technically what was asked for.
0

MyString.Remove(1, 2); also works

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0

Answer to your question is NO.

Correct is MyString[position of character]. For your case MyString[0], 0 is the FIRST character of any string.

A character value is designated with ' (single quote), like this x character value is written as 'x'.

A string value is designated with " ( double quote), like this x string value is written as "x".

So Substring() method is also does not return a character, Substring() method returns a string!!!

A string is an array of characters, and last character must be '\0' (null) character. Thats the difference between character array and string ( which is an array of characters with last character as "end of string marker" '\0' null.

And also notice that 'x' IS NOT EQUAL to "x". Because "x" is actually 'x'+'\0'.

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0

Maybe this will help. I'm using txtModel_Leave event then create method to detect the first char in main textbox.

private void txtMain_Leave(object sender, EventArgs e) { detectFirstChar(); } private void detectFirstChar() { string mystr = txtModel.Text; if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(txtModel.Text)) { txtAwalan.Text = ""; } else if (mystr.Substring(0, 1) == "F") { txtKategori.Text = "Finishing"; } else if((mystr.Substring(0, 1) == "H")) { txtKategori.Text = "Half"; } else { txtKategori.Text = "NONE"; } } 

1 Comment

This is not a good solution. Please see: stackoverflow.com/questions/814878/…
-1

getting a char from a string may depend on the enconding (string default is UTF-16)

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32141891

string str = new String(new char[] { '\uD800', '\uDC00', 'z' }); string first = str.Substring(0, char.IsHighSurrogate(str[0]) ? 2 : 1); 

1 Comment

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