Get the last element of a std string

Question

I was wondering if there s an abbreviation or a more elegant way of getting the last character of a string like in   char lastChar   myString at  myString length   - 1      Something like myString back   doesn t seem to exist  Is there an equivalent

User · Accepted Answer

In C  11 and beyond  you can use the back member function   char ch   myStr back      In C  03  std  string  back is not available due to an oversight  but you can get around this by dereferencing the reverse iterator you get back from rbegin   char ch    myStr rbegin      In both cases  be careful to make sure the string actually has at least one character in it  Otherwise  you ll get undefined behavior  which is a Bad Thing   Hope this helps

User · Answer

You probably want to check the length of the string first and do something like this   if   myStr empty          char lastChar    myStr rbegin

User · Answer

myString end   - 1  maybe  That s not exactly elegant either   A python-esque myString at -1  would be asking too much of an already-bloated class

User · Answer

You could write a function template back that delegates to the member function for ordinary containers and a normal function that implements the missing functionality for strings   template  lt typename C gt  typename C  reference back C amp  container        return container back       template  lt typename C gt  typename C  const reference back const C amp  container        return container back       char amp  back std  string amp  str        return   str end   - 1      char back const std  string amp  str        return   str end   - 1       Then you can just say back foo  without worrying whether foo is a string or a vector

[c++] Get the last element of a std::string

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