Get the last element of a std::string

Question

I was wondering if there's an abbreviation or a more elegant way of getting the last character of a string like in:

char lastChar = myString.at( myString.length() - 1 ); 

Something like myString.back() doesn't seem to exist. Is there an equivalent?

Answer 1

In C++11 and beyond, you can use the back member function:

char ch = myStr.back(); 

In C++03, std::string::back is not available due to an oversight, but you can get around this by dereferencing the reverse_iterator you get back from rbegin:

char ch = *myStr.rbegin(); 

In both cases, be careful to make sure the string actually has at least one character in it! Otherwise, you'll get undefined behavior, which is a Bad Thing.

Hope this helps!