How to get the last element of an array in C++

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the last element of an array in C++.

Consider, we have the following array.

array<int,4> arr {20, 30, 40, 50};

Now, we want to get the last element 50 from the above array.

To get the last element (50) from the array, we can use the std::array::back() function in C++.

The std::array::back() function is defined inside the array.h header file.

Here is an example:

#include <iostream>
#include <array>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    array<int,4> arr {20, 30, 40, 50};
    int lastElement = arr.back();

    cout<<"last element is: "<<lastElement<<endl;

    return 0;
}

Output:

50

Similarly, we can also get the last element of an array by using the subscript operator [] with last element index.

In C++ arrays are zero-indexed. The first element index is 0, to get the last element index we need to subtract the array.size()-1, because size() function returns the total number of elements from an array.

Example:

#include <iostream>
#include <array>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    array<int,4> arr {20, 30, 40, 50};
    int lastElement = arr[arr.size()-1];

    cout<<"last element is: "<<lastElement<<endl;

    return 0;
}