Get First Character or Nth Character of string in C#

In previous article, I mentioned how to Serialize List to JSON in C# but now in this article, we will see how to get first character of string in C# or how to get first N characters of string in C# using SubString() and other methods.

Get First Character of string in C#

Let's take a basic example, suppose we have a string and we want only first character of that string, then we can simply use "str[0]", it will return first character of string "str"

Example:

             string test = "Hello World";
		
		Console.WriteLine(test[0]);  // return 'H' 

Using SubString

You can also use SubString(startingPosition,Length) method of C# string, which takes 2 arguments

startingPosition = position from where we want to start extracting string

length = character length until we need string (should be less than total length of string)

Considering above example, if we need first 1 character of string using SubString()

		string test = "Hello World";
		
		Console.WriteLine(test.Substring(0,1)); // return 'H' 

Using Linq

We can also use Linq to get first character from string

char c = test.FirstOrDefault();
//output = "H"

Get First 2 Characters of string in C#

To get the first 2 characters of string in C#, we can use SubString Method, as mentioned above.

Now, the length argument should be 2 instead of 1, as it was in above example, here is complete example

		string test = "Hello World";
		
		Console.WriteLine(test.Substring(0,2)); // return 'He' 

Here is the complete example

using System;
using System.Linq;
					
public class Program
{
	public static void Main()
	{
		string test = "Hello World";
		
		Console.WriteLine(test.Substring(0,2)); // return 'He' 
		
		Console.WriteLine(test[0]);  // return 'H' 
		Console.WriteLine(test.Substring(0,1)); // return 'H' 
		
		Console.WriteLine(test.FirstOrDefault()); // return 'H' 
	}
}

Get Last Character from String in C#

If you want last character of string in C#, you can simply use SubString() or using Array Index, as shown in below code.

		string test = "Hello World";
		
		Console.WriteLine(test.Substring(test.Length -1 , 1)); // return 'd' 
		Console.WriteLine(test[test.Length -1]); // return 'd' 

That's it, hope it helps.

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