7.2. Bracket Notation

Understanding strings as sequential collections of characters gives us much more than just a mental model of how they are structured. C# provides a rich collection of tools—including special syntax and operations—that allows us to work with strings.

Bracket notation is the special syntax that allows us to access the individual characters that make up a string. To access a character, we use the syntax someString[i], where i is the index of the character we want to access. String indices are integers representing the position of a character within a given string, and they start at 0. Thus, the first character of a string has index 0, the second has index 1, and so on.

Consider the string "C Sharp". The 'C' has index 0, the whitespace ' ' has index 1, 'S' has index 2, and so on. When referring to these indices, we switch to the char data type.

The string "C Sharp" with indices labeled below each letter

The indices of a string.

An expression of the form someString[i] gives the character at index i.

Example

This program prints out the initials of the person’s name.

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string csDesigner = "Anders Hejlsberg";
char firstInitial = csDesigner[0];
char lastInitial = csDesigner[7];

string outputStr = "C Sharp was designed by somebody with initials " +
   firstInitial + "." +
   lastInitial + ".";

Console.WriteLine(outputStr);

Console Output

C Sharp was designed by somebody with initials A.H.

What happens if we try to access an index that doesn’t exist, for example -1 or an index larger than the length of the string?

Try It!

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string csDesigner = "Anders Hejlsberg";

Console.WriteLine(csDesigner[-1]);
Console.WriteLine(csDesigner[42]);

repl.it

Question

What does an expression using bracket notation evaluate to when the index is invalid (the index does not correspond to a character in the string)?

7.2.1. Check Your Understanding

Question

If string phrase = "Code for fun", then phrase[2] evaluates to:

  1. 'o'

  2. 'd'

  3. "for"

  4. "fun"

Question

Which of the following returns true given string myStr = "Index"? Choose all correct answers.

  1. myStr[2] == 'n';

  2. myStr[4] == 'x';

  3. myStr[1] == 'e';

  4. myStr[0] == 'I';

Question

What is printed by the following code?

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string phrase = "C Sharp rocks!";
Console.WriteLine(phrase[phrase.length - 8]);

  1. 'p'

  2. ' '

  3. 'o'

  4. 's'