How to Get the Last Character of a String in Java

1. Get the Last Character of a String in Java Using substring()
2. Get the Last Character of a String in Java Using charAt()
3. Get the Last Character of a String in Java by Converting the String to a Char Array

This tutorial will introduce how we can get the last character of the string in Java.

Get the Last Character of a String in Java Using substring()

In the below example code, the last character of exampleString is g. We will use a method of the String class called substring() that takes out a substring as its name suggests. The substring(startingIndex) method takes an argument which should be the index or position of the part of the string that we need. We only need the last character, so we pass exampleString.length() - 1 as the starting index.

Now we have the last character in the lastCharacter variable as a string. We need to have our character as a char so that we can use toCharArray() to convert the lastCharacter to an array of char and then get the only single character in that array.

public class LastCharString {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String exampleString = "This is a String";

    String lastCharacter = exampleString.substring(exampleString.length() - 1);

    char[] lastChar = lastCharacter.toCharArray();

    System.out.println("Last char: " + lastChar[lastChar.length - 1]);
  }
}

Output:

Last char: g

Get the Last Character of a String in Java Using charAt()

Instead of getting the last character as a string and then convert it to a char[], we can directly get the last character in a string by using the chartAt() method of the String class. This method lets us get a specific single character at the specified index number.

exampleString.charAt(exampleString.length() - 1) is where we get the character located at the last position of exampleString.

public class LastCharString {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String exampleString = "This is a String";

    char lastChar = exampleString.charAt(exampleString.length() - 1);

    System.out.println("Last char: " + lastChar);
  }
}

Output:

Last char: g

Get the Last Character of a String in Java by Converting the String to a Char Array

Another short method that we can use is to directly convert the exampleString into an array of char. It makes the code more concise and faster. We can use the toCharArray() method, which we used in this article’s first example, to convert the whole string to a char array. Then we get the last character by accessing the array with the last character’s index - lastCharArray.length - 1.

public class LastCharString {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String exampleString = "This is a String";

    char[] lastCharArray = exampleString.toCharArray();

    char lastChar = lastCharArray[lastCharArray.length - 1];

    System.out.println("Last char: " + lastChar);
  }
}

Output:

Last char: g