2 ways to find the first and last character of a string in Swift

How to find the first and last character of a string in Swift:

We can get the first and last character of a string in Swift in different ways. In this post, I will show you two different ways to read the first and last characters of a given string.

Method 1: By using the first and last properties of String:

The first and last properties of a String are defined as:

var first: Character?
var last: Character?

Both are optional values and return the first and the last characters of a String. For an empty string, the properties will be nil. By using these two properties, we can get the first and the last characters of a String as shown in the following example:

let givenString = "hello world"

if let firstChar = givenString.first{
    print(firstChar)
}

if let lastChar = givenString.last{
    print(lastChar)
}

Get the code on GitHub

It will print:

h
d

Method 2: By using the index of first and last characters:

We can use the below two properties to get the first and last index of a string:

var startIndex: String.Index

var endIndex: String.Index

The endIndex variable is the index after the last index. So, we need to use the following method to get the index just before it or the last index of the string:

func index(before: String.Index) -> String.Index

With these values, we can get the first and last character of a String:

let givenString = "hello world"

print(givenString[givenString.startIndex])
print(givenString[givenString.index(before: givenString.endIndex)])

Get the code on GitHub

It will print the same output.

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