substring a multibyte character safely c#

Question

I'm trying to do a substring on a string containing multi byte characters, and I'm not getting the results I expect. I am trying to substring strings like 😂test. The first character is a 4 byte character so calling ToCharArray on this string returns:

• 55357 #bytes 1 and 2 of the first character
• 56384 #bytes 3 and 4 of the first character
• 116 #t
• 101 #e
• 115 #s
• 116 #t

So when I call .Substring(1) on this string, it returns an invalid string that starts with the third and fourth bytes of the first character, not 'test'. Is there any way to get .Substring and other string operations to treat that character as a single unit?

Answer 1

You want to use StringInfo

        var yourstring = "😂test";
    StringInfo si = new StringInfo(yourstring);
    var substring = si.SubstringByTextElements(1);