Question

I have a string in java, of uncertain length, and I need to take the first 3 and last 3 characters and put them into new strings. Is there a simple way to do this?

Answer 1

Funny, all solutions are buggy (update: except the one with the regex) and may result in StringIndexOutOfBoundsException when the input string’s length is less then 3 (the question explicitly says the length is uncertain). Assuming that str is not null, the proper way would be:

String first = str.substring(0, Math.min(str.length(), 3));
String second = str.substring(Math.max(0, str.length() - 3), str.length());