How to Remove the Last Character from a String in Java

Being able to manipulate strings is a common task in programming.

One of those tasks include removing the last character of a string.

In this post, we'll look at how to remove the last character of a string in Java.

Removing the last character

To remove the last character of a string, let's first start with our example string:

JAVA
String string = "Hello World";

Now, we can use the substring method which takes a start index and an end index and returns a substring of the original string.

We can pass it a start index of 0 and an end index of the length of the string minus 1, which is the index of the last character.

Combined, this has the effect of excluding the last character of the string:

JAVA
String string = "Hello World";  

String substring = string.substring(0, string.length() - 1);

System.out.println(substring);

BASH
Hello Worl

Keep in mind that substring is a method that returns a new string, so we can't just use it to modify the original string.

That is why we created a new variable to store the new string.

Conclusion

In this post, we looked at how to use the substring method to exclude the last character of a string.

Just pass in 0 and string.length() - 1 to the substring method and you'll get the substring without the last character.

Thanks for reading and happy coding!

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