Get nth character of a string in Swift programming language

Question

How can I get the nth character of a string? I tried bracket([]) accessor with no luck.

var string = \"Hello, world!\"

var firstChar = string[         


        

Answer 1

Here's an extension you can use, working with Swift 3.1. A single index will return a Character, which seems intuitive when indexing a String, and a Range will return a String.

extension String {
    subscript (i: Int) -> Character {
        return Array(self.characters)[i]
    }
    
    subscript (r: CountableClosedRange) -> String {
        return String(Array(self.characters)[r])
    }
    
    subscript (r: CountableRange) -> String {
        return self[r.lowerBound...r.upperBound-1]
    }
}

Some examples of the extension in action:

let string = "Hello"

let c1 = string[1]  // Character "e"
let c2 = string[-1] // fatal error: Index out of range

let r1 = string[1..<4] // String "ell"
let r2 = string[1...4] // String "ello"
let r3 = string[1...5] // fatal error: Array index is out of range

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n.b. You could add an additional method to the above extension to return a String with a single character if wanted:

subscript (i: Int) -> String {
    return String(self[i])
}

Note that then you would have to explicitly specify the type you wanted when indexing the string:

let c: Character = string[3] // Character "l"
let s: String = string[0]    // String "H"