How to get first n characters of a string in Java

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

Consider, we have a string like this:

String str = "google";

Now, we want to get the first 3 three characters goo from the above string.

Getting the first n characters

To access the first n characters of a string in Java, we can use the built-in substring() method by passing 0, n as an arguments to it.

0 is the first character index (that is start position), n is the number of characters we need to get from a string.

Here is an example, that gets the first 3 characters of a string:

String str = "google";
System.out.println(str.substring(0, 3));

Output:

"goo"

Note: The extraction starts at index 0 and ends before index 3.

Similarly, we can also get the first 4 characters of a string like this:

String str = "google";
System.out.println(str.substring(0, 4));

Output:

"goog"