How to get the first characters in a string? (Swift 3)

Question

I want to get a substring out of a string which starts with either "<ONLINE>" or "<OFFLINE>" (which should become my substring). When I try to create a Range object, I can easily access the the first character by using startIndex but how do I get the index of the closing bracket of my substring which will be either the 8th or 9th character of the full string?

UPDATE:

A simple example:

let onlineString:String = "<ONLINE> Message with online tag!"

let substring:String = // Get the "<ONLINE> " part from my string?

let onlineStringWithoutTag:String = onlineString.replaceOccurances(of: substring, with: "")

// What I should get as the result: "Message with online tag!"

So basically, the question is: what do I do for substring?

Solution 1

If you did not want to use range

let onlineString:String = "<ONLINE> Message with online tag!"

let substring:String = onlineString.components(separatedBy: " ")[0]

print(substring) // <ONLINE>

Solution 2

let name = "Ajay"

// Use following line to extract first chracter(In String format)

print(name.characters.first?.description ?? "");

// Output : "A"

Solution 3

The correct way would be to use indexes as following:

let string = "123 456"
let firstCharIndex = string.index(string.startIndex, offsetBy: 1)
let firstChar = string.substring(to: firstCharIndex)
print(firstChar)

Solution 4

This Code provides you the first character of the string. Swift provides this method which returns character? you have to wrap it before use

let str = "FirstCharacter"
print(str.first!)

Solution 5

Similar to OOPer's:

let string = "<ONLINE>"

let closingTag = CharacterSet(charactersIn: ">")
if let closingTagIndex = string.rangeOfCharacter(from: closingTag) {
    let mySubstring = string.substring(with: string.startIndex..<closingTagIndex.upperBound)
}

Or with regex:

let string = "<ONLINE>jhkjhkh>"

if let range = string.range(of: "<[A-Z]+>", options: .regularExpression) {
    let mySubstring = string.substring(with: range)
}

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