Is there a way to access the character of a string in a string array in C#?

Question

I have a string array, I want to access the characters of the first element in that array:

string[] str= new string[num];

for(int i = 0; i < num; i++)
{
    str[i] = Console.ReadLine();
}

To access the characters of the first element in the string array, in Java

str[0].CharAt[0] // 1st character

Is there a way in C# for this? The only function I could see was use of substring. It will incur more overhead in such case.

Possible duplicate of [how to return the character which is at the index?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2416894/how-to-return-the-character-which-is-at-the-index) — Lance U. Matthews, Feb 01 '17 at 20:36
@Rinktacular: "which will print out one character at a time" - nope, because `str` is an *array of* strings, not a single string. — O. R. Mapper, Feb 01 '17 at 20:40
@Rintacular this doesn't solve, I want to access character of a string in the array — Advaitha, Feb 01 '17 at 20:42

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 01 '17 at 20:43

5

You would use:

str[0][0]

where the first [0] is accessing the 0th array member, while the next [0] is the indexer defined by System.String which gives the 0th char value (UTF-16 code unit) of the string.

answered Feb 01 '17 at 20:43

Jeppe Stig Nielsen

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NicoRiff · Answer 2 · 2017-02-01T20:49:31.793

1

Yes, you can do that:

string[] s = new string[]{"something", "somethingMore"};
char c = s[0][0];

edited Feb 01 '17 at 20:49

answered Feb 01 '17 at 20:37

NicoRiff

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2

What's the downvote on this answer for? It surely answers the question, even if the example is not directly copy-and-pasteable into the OP's code. – O. R. Mapper Feb 01 '17 at 20:41
This satisfies the question. Not sure why it is down voted. – Rinktacular Feb 01 '17 at 20:43
1

Didn't downvote, but it doesn't answer the question. The question is about the characters inside a string inside an array. Your answer is just the characters inside the string. You're missing the array part. – Kenneth K. Feb 01 '17 at 20:46

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 01 '17 at 20:48

0

You could convert the first string of the string array to a character array and simply get the first value of the character array.

string[] stringArray = {"abc"};
char[] charArray = stringArray[0].ToCharArray();
char first = charArray[0];

answered Feb 01 '17 at 20:48

Ryan Johnson

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1

There is no need to copy the entire string contents over into a new array if you just want the first `char`. – Jeppe Stig Nielsen Feb 01 '17 at 20:57
Why make this into a char array? – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine Feb 01 '17 at 21:06
I didn't know you could index on a string like the other answers show. Thanks! – Ryan Johnson Feb 01 '17 at 21:13

Is there a way to access the character of a string in a string array in C#?

3 Answers3