Question

I am trying to slice the last four characters off a character array, and I tried the method that Python uses without success;

char *charone = (char*)("I need the last four")
char *chartwo = charone[-4:]

cout << chartwo << endl;

I would want this code to return:

four

But C/C++ doesn’t seem to be that easy…

Where could I find a simple alternative that will return the last four characters of one character array into another character array?

Answer 1

Try:

int len = strlen(charone);
char *chartwo = charone + (len < 4 ? 0 : len - 4);

In C++, you can replace that with:

char* chartwo = charone + (std::max)(strlen(charone), 4) - 4;

The code uses a special property of C strings that only works for chopping off the beginning of a string.