How to get first character of a string in R

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first character of a string in the R language.

Using the substr() function

We can get the first character of a string by using the built-in substr() function in R.

The substr() function takes 3 arguments, the first one is a string, the second is start position, third is end position.

Here is an example, that gets the first character g from the color string:

color = 'green'
firstCharacter = substr(name,1,1)
print(firstCharacter)

Output:

[1] "g"

In the above example, we have passed the 1 , 1 as second and third arguments to the substr() function. so it begins the extraction at index position 1, ends at index position 1.

Note: The substr() function doesn’t mutate the original string.

You can also read, how to get first n characters of string in R.