Question

I’m working with an entity (Employee) that has 3 fields: FirstName, LastName, & Login

I want to grab the lastname and the first letter of the firstname field and write this to the login field. How do I grab the first letter of the firstname?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

To get the first character (not necessarily a letter) use an index into the string:

char c = employee.FirstName[0];

You may also want to first check that the string is non-null and non-empty and strip leading whitespace, and that the first character is actually a letter:

if (employee != null && employee.FirstName != null) {
    string name = employee.FirstName.TrimStart();
    if (name.Length > 0) {
        char firstChar = name[0];
        if (char.IsLetter(firstChar)) {
            employee.Login = firstChar.ToString();
        }
    }
}