Question

I have strings like this:

var a = "abcdefg";
var b = "xxxxxxxx";

The strings are always longer than five characters.

Now I need to trim off the last 3 characters. Is there some simple way that I can do this with C#?

Answer 1

In the trivial case you can just use

result = s.Substring(0, s.Length-3);

to remove the last three characters from the string.

Or as Jason suggested Remove is an alternative:

result = s.Remove(s.Length-3)

---

Unfortunately for unicode strings there can be a few problems:

• A unicode codepoint can consist of multiple chars since the encoding of string is UTF-16 (See Surrogate pairs). This happens only for characters outside the basic plane, i.e. which have a code-point >2^16. This is relevant if you want to support Chinese.
• A glyph (graphical symbol) can consist of multiple codepoints. For example ä can be written as a followed by a combining ¨.
• Behavior with right-to-left writing might not be what you want either