How to get the last five characters of a string using Substring() in C#?

Question

If your input string could be less than five characters long then you should be aware that string.Substring will throw an ArgumentOutOfRangeException if the startIndex argument is negative.

To solve this potential problem you can use the following code:

string sub = input.Substring(Math.Max(0, input.Length - 5));

Or more explicitly:

public static string Right(string input, int length)
{
    if (length >= input.Length)
    {
        return input;
    }
    else
    {
        return input.Substring(input.Length - length);
    }
}

string sub = input.Substring(input.Length - 5);

If you can use extension methods, this will do it in a safe way regardless of string length:

public static string Right(this string text, int maxLength)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text) || maxLength <= 0)
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    if (maxLength < text.Length)
    {
        return text.Substring(text.Length - maxLength);
    }

    return text;
}

And to use it:

string sub = input.Right(5);

static void Main()
    {
        string input = "OneTwoThree";

            //Get last 5 characters
        string sub = input.Substring(6);
        Console.WriteLine("Substring: {0}", sub); // Output Three. 
    }

• Substring(0, 3) - Returns substring of first 3 chars. //One

• Substring(3, 3) - Returns substring of second 3 chars. //Two

• Substring(6) - Returns substring of all chars after first 6. //Three

One way is to use the Length property of the string as part of the input to Substring:

string sub = input.Substring(input.Length - 5); // Retrieves the last 5 characters of input

Here is a quick extension method you can use that mimics PHP syntax. Include AssemblyName.Extensions to the code file you are using the extension in.

Then you could call:

input.SubstringReverse(-5) and it will return "Three".

namespace AssemblyName.Extensions {

    public static class StringExtensions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Takes a negative integer - counts back from the end of the string.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="str"></param>
        /// <param name="length"></param>
        public static string SubstringReverse(this string str, int length)
        {
            if (length > 0) 
            {
                throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("Length must be less than zero.");
            }

            if (str.Length < Math.Abs(length))
            {
                throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("Length cannot be greater than the length of the string.");
            }

            return str.Substring((str.Length + length), Math.Abs(length));
        }
    }
}