Objective-C - Remove last character from string

Question

In your controller class, create an action method you will hook the button up to in Interface Builder. Inside that method you can trim your string like this:

if ([string length] > 0) {
    string = [string substringToIndex:[string length] - 1];
} else {
    //no characters to delete... attempting to do so will result in a crash
}

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If you want a fancy way of doing this in just one line of code you could write it as:

string = [string substringToIndex:string.length-(string.length>0)];

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*Explanation of fancy one-line code snippet:

If there is a character to delete (i.e. the length of the string is greater than 0)
     (string.length>0) returns 1 thus making the code return:
          string = [string substringToIndex:string.length-1];

If there is NOT a character to delete (i.e. the length of the string is NOT greater than 0)
     (string.length>0) returns 0 thus making the code return:
          string = [string substringToIndex:string.length-0];
     Which prevents crashes.

If it's an NSMutableString (which I would recommend since you're changing it dynamically), you can use:

[myString deleteCharactersInRange:NSMakeRange([myRequestString length]-1, 1)];

The solutions given here actually do not take into account multi-byte Unicode characters ("composed characters"), and could result in invalid Unicode strings.

In fact, the iOS header file which contains the declaration of substringToIndex contains the following comment:

Hint: Use with rangeOfComposedCharacterSequencesForRange: to avoid breaking up composed characters

See how to use rangeOfComposedCharacterSequenceAtIndex: to delete the last character correctly.

The documentation is your friend, NSString supports a call substringWithRange that can shorten the string that you have an return the shortened String. You cannot modify an instance of NSString it is immutable. If you have an NSMutableString is has a method called deleteCharactersInRange that can modify the string in place

...
NSRange r;
r.location = 0;
r.size = [mutable length]-1;
NSString* shorted = [stringValue substringWithRange:r];
...