Delete everything after part of a string

Question

I have a string that is built out of three parts. The word I want the string to be (changes), a seperating part (doesn't change) and the last part which changes. I want to delete the seperating part and the ending part. The seperating part is " - " so what I'm wondering is if theres a way to delete everything after a certaint part of the string.

An example of this scenario would be if I wanted to turn this: "Stack Overflow - A place to ask stuff" into this: "Stack Overflow". Any help is appreciated!

Solution 1

For example, you could do:

String result = input.split("-")[0];

or

String result = input.substring(0, input.indexOf("-"));

(and add relevant error handling)

Solution 2

The apache commons StringUtils provide a substringBefore method

StringUtils.substringBefore("Stack Overflow - A place to ask stuff", " - ")

Solution 3

Kotlin Solution

Use the built-in Kotlin substringBefore function (Documentation):

var string = "So much text - no - more"
string = string.substringBefore(" - ") // "So much text"

It also has an optional second param, which is the return value if the delimiter is not found. The default value is the original string

string.substringBefore(" - ", "fail")  // "So much text"
string.substringBefore(" -- ", "fail") // "fail"
string.substringBefore(" -- ")         // "So much text - no - more"

Solution 4

You can use this

String mysourcestring = "developer is - development";
String substring = mysourcestring.substring(0,mysourcestring.indexOf("-"));

it would be written "developer is -"

Solution 5

Perhaps thats what you are looking for:

String str="Stack Overflow - A place to ask stuff";

String newStr = str.substring(0, str.indexOf("-"));

View more solutions

Comments

[Vishy]

That retains everything after the matching string.

[mOna]

Do you know what if the primary string is like this : /name/nm1243456/lkbfwugbòwougs and I want to keep only nm123456? (I cannot use s.th like input.substring(6, directorImdbId.length() - 15) since the number of characters in the last part of string is changing (it might be 16 or 17 characters )

[Aviral Bansal]

Was looking for a solution to ignore everything in a string after a substring and your answer inspired me to come up with String substr = mysourcestring.substring(0,mysourcestring.indexOf("searchSeq‌​")+"searchSeq".lengt‌​h()); So for example if I need to ignore everything in a URL after a definite substring, this can be helpful.

[Brian Agnew]

This works really nicely. I'd expect most non-trivial projects to reference Apache Commons, and this avoids the error-prone fiddling with substrings/indexing