How to remove first and last character of a string in C#?

Question

String: \"hello to the very tall person I am about to meet\"

What I want it to become is this:

String: hello to the very tall person I          


        

Answer 1

If you are trying to remove specific characters from a string, like the quotes in your example, you can use Trim for both start and end trimming, or TrimStart and TrimEnd if you want to trim different characters from the start and end. Pass these methods a character (or array of characters) that you want removed from the beginning and end of the string.

var quotedString = "\"hello\"";
var unQuotedString = quotedString.TrimStart('"').TrimEnd('"'); 

// If the characters are the same, then you only need one call to Trim('"'):
unQuotedString = quotedString.Trim('"');

Console.WriteLine(quotedString);
Console.WriteLine(unQuotedString);

Output:

"hello"

hello

Alternatively, you can use Skip and Take along with Concat to remove characters from the beginning and end of the string. This will work even for and empty string, saving you any worries about calculating string length:

var original = "\"hello\"";
var firstAndLastRemoved = string.Concat(original.Skip(1).Take(original.Length - 2));