charAt() Method In Java - Java Character Extraction

Strings > Character Extraction >
Siva Nookala - 04 Apr 2016

This method takes an index as a parameter and returns the character that is present at that index of the string. Indexing starts from zero. i. e index of 1st character is 0, 2nd character is 1 and so on. The index of the last character is the length of the string - 1.

CharAtString

CODE

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class CharAt
{
    public static void main(String arg[])
    {
        String s1 = "Merit Campus";
        char c1 = s1.charAt(0); //LINE A
        System.out.println(c1);
        char c2 = s1.charAt(4);  //LINE B
        System.out.println(c2);    
    }
}

OUTPUT

M
t

DESCRIPTION

At LINE A, 0 is passed as parameter and character at 0th index is returned. At LINE B, character at 4th index(5th character) is returned.

THINGS TO TRY

Include the below code line at LINE A

char c1 = s1.charAt(12);
java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown, since the passed value is greater than the string ending index.(Index begins with 0 and ends with the index String length -1)

Include the below code line at LINE B

char c1 = s1.charAt(-1);
java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown because the index is less than the string starting index.

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Another String method, startsWith(), can be confused with the function of charAt(0). The difference lies in the result of either method: charAt(0) will return a character, whereas startsWith() is a test, returning a boolean.

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