Removing first and last character of a string in C

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to remove the first and last character of a string in C.

Consider, we have the following string.

char color[5] = "green";

Now, we want to remove the first character g and the last character n from the above string.

Removing the first and last character

To remove the first and last character of a string, we can use the following syntax in C.

Here is an example:

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

int main() {
  char color[5] = "green";
  char *result = color+1; // removes first character
  result[strlen(result)-1] = '\0'; // removes last character

  printf("%s\n",result);
}

Output:

"ree"

In the example above, we removed the first character of a string by changing the starting point of a string to index position 1, then we removed the last character by setting its value to \0.

In C \0 means the ending of a string.