How to get the first n characters of a string in C

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first n number of characters from a string in the C language.

In C language, strings are the array of characters, where the index of the first character is 0, the second character is 1 etc and they are always terminated with a null character ‘\0’.

Getting the first n characters

To get the first n characters of a string, we can use the memcopy() function in C.

Here is an example, that gets the first 3 characters from the fruit string:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
  char fruit[5] = "apple";
  char firstThree[5];
  memcpy(firstThree, fruit , 3);
  printf("%s", firstThree);
}

Output:

"app"

In the above example, we have passed three arguments to the memcpy() function, the first one is a destination where the content needs to be copied, the second one is a source, third one is the number of characters we need to copy from a string.

Similary, we can also get the first 2 characters of a string like this:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
  char fruit[5] = "apple";
  char firstTwo[5];
  memcpy(firstTwo, fruit , 2);
  printf("%s", firstTwo);
}

Output:

"ap"