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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Syntax Questions › Truncating strings
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Truncating strings (Read 1027 times)
jbb
Truncating strings
May 11th, 2010, 3:57pm  
I have a bunch of long strings I need to capture just the first 20 characters of.

I know I can use loop with char and append a new string (or stringbuffer), and Ill probably end up doing this, I'm just wondering if there's a quick and easy function I don't know about.

It would be something akin to LEFT(reference,#chars) in Excel.
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Smitty
Re: Truncating strings
Reply #1 - May 11th, 2010, 6:17pm  
jbb wrote on May 11th, 2010, 3:57pm:
I have a bunch of long strings I need to capture just the first 20 characters of.

I know I can use loop with char and append a new string (or stringbuffer), and Ill probably end up doing this, I'm just wondering if there's a quick and easy function I don't know about.

It would be something akin to LEFT(reference,#chars) in Excel.


You want the substring() method:
Code:

String big;

// big gets set to something

String little = big.substring(0, 20);

I don't know if this will barf if big has less than 20 characters; if you want to be safe, check that (big.length()>=20) before taking the substring.
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jbb
Re: Truncating strings
Reply #2 - May 17th, 2010, 8:30pm  
Perfect!  Thanks, Smitty.
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