How to remove first character of a string in R

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

Removing the first character

To remove the string’s first character, we can use the built-in substring() function in R.

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

Here is an example, that removes the first character j from the month string:

month = 'july'
result = substring(month, 2)
print(result)

Output:

[1] "uly"

In the above example, we have passed the 2 as a second argument to the substring() function. so it begins the extraction at index position 2, and extracts the remaining part of the string.

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

Similarly, we can also use the stri_sub() function from the stringi package.

Example:

stri_sub(month,2)