How to get the first character of a string in C++

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about different ways to get the first character of a string in C++.

Consider, we have the following string.

string car = "audi";

Now, we want to get the first character a from the above string.

Getting the first character

To access the first character of a string, we can use the subscript operator [ ] by passing an index 0.

Here is an example, that gets the first character a:

#include <iostream>
#include <string.h>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    string car = "audi";
    char firstCharacter= car[0];
    cout<< firstCharacter;
    return 0;
}

Output:

"s"

Note: In C++ Strings are a sequence of characters, so the first character index is 0 and the second character index is 1, etc.

Similarly, we can use the built-in front() function in C++ to get the first character of a string.

#include <iostream>
#include <string.h>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    string car = "audi";
    char firstCharacter= car.front();
    cout<< firstCharacter;
    return 0;
}

We can also use the at() function to get the first character like this.

#include <iostream>
#include <string.h>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    string car = "audi";
    char firstCharacter= car.at(0);
    cout<< firstCharacter;
    return 0;
}

In the code above, we have passed the first character index 0 to the at() function.