What's the best way to return the first word of a string in C#?
Basically if the string is "hello world"
, I need to get "hello"
.
Thanks
strncat: In C/C++, strncat() is a predefined function used for string handling. string. h is the header file required for string functions. This function appends not more than n characters from the string pointed to by src to the end of the string pointed to by dest plus a terminating Null-character.
C strlen() The strlen() function calculates the length of a given string. The strlen() function takes a string as an argument and returns its length.
String functions are used in computer programming languages to manipulate a string or query information about a string (some do both). Most programming languages that have a string datatype will have some string functions although there may be other low-level ways within each language to handle strings directly.
In C programming, a string is a sequence of characters terminated with a null character \0 . For example: char c[] = "c string"; When the compiler encounters a sequence of characters enclosed in the double quotation marks, it appends a null character \0 at the end by default.
You can try:
string s = "Hello World"; string firstWord = s.Split(' ').First();
Ohad Schneider's comment is right, so you can simply ask for the First()
element as there will always be at least one element.
For further info on whether to use First()
or FirstOrDefault()
you can learn more here
You can use a combination of Substring
and IndexOf
.
var s = "Hello World"; var firstWord = s.Substring(0,s.IndexOf(" "));
However, this will not give the expected word if the input string only has one word, so a special case is needed.
var s = "Hello"; var firstWord = s.IndexOf(" ") > -1 ? s.Substring(0,s.IndexOf(" ")) : s;
One way is to look for a space in the string, and use the position of the space to get the first word:
int index = s.IndexOf(' ');
if (index != -1) {
s = s.Substring(0, index);
}
Another way is to use a regular expression to look for a word boundary:
s = Regex.Match(s, @"(.+?)\b").Groups[1].Value;
The answer of Jamiec is the most efficient if you want to split only on spaces. But, just for the sake of variety, here's another version:
var FirstWord = "Hello World".Split(null, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)[0];
As a bonus this will also recognize all kinds of exotic whitespace characters and will ignore multiple consecutive whitespace characters (in effect it will trim the leading/trailing whitespace from the result).
Note that it will count symbols as letters too, so if your string is Hello, world!
, it will return Hello,
. If you don't need that, then pass an array of delimiter characters in the first parameter.
But if you want it to be 100% foolproof in every language of the world, then it's going to get tough...
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