How to Remove the Last Character of a String?

1. Overview

In this quick article, we are going to check and discuss different techniques for removing the last character of a String.

2. Using String.substring() 

The easiest way is to use the built-in substring() method of the String class.

In order to remove the last character of a given String, we have to use two parameters: 0 as the starting index, and index of the penultimate character. We can achieve that by calling String‘s length() method and subtracting 1 from the result.

However, this method is not null-safe and if we use an empty string this is going to fail.

To overcome issues with null and empty strings, we can wrap the method in a helper class:

public static String removeLastChar(String s) {
    return (s == null || s.length() == 0)
      ? null 
      : (s.substring(0, s.length() - 1));
}

We can refactor the code and use Java 8:

public static String removeLastCharOptional(String s) {
    return Optional.ofNullable(s)
      .filter(str -> str.length() != 0)
      .map(str -> str.substring(0, str.length() - 1))
      .orElse(s);
    }

3. Using StringUtils.substring() 

Instead of reinventing the wheel, we can use StringUtils class from Apache Commons Lang3 library, that offers helpful String operations. One of them is a null-safe substring() method, which handles exceptions.

To include StringUtils we have to update our pom.xml file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
    <version>3.0</version>
</dependency>

StringUtils.substring() requires three parameters: a given String, an index of the first character (in our case it will be 0 always) and index of the penultimate character. Again, we can simply use the length() method and subtract 1:

String TEST_STRING = "abcdef";

StringUtils.substring(TEST_STRING, 0, TEST_STRING.length() - 1);

Yet, this operation is not null-safe again. It will work with empty Strings fine though.

4. Using StringUtils.chop() 

StringUtils class provides the chop() method that works well with all edge scenarios: empty and null Strings.

It is very easy to use and requires only one parameter: the String. Its sole purpose is to remove the last character. Nothing more, nothing less:

StringUtils.chop(TEST_STRING);

5. Using Regular Expression

We can also remove the last character (or any number of characters) from a String by making good use of regular expressions.

For example, we can use the replaceAll() method of String class itself – which takes two parameters: regular expression and the replacement String:

TEST_STRING.replaceAll(".$", "");

Note that, because we’re calling a method on the String – the operation is, of course, not null-safe.

Also, replaceAll() and regex expression can be complex at first sight. You can read more about regex here, but to make the logic a bit more user-friendly, we can wrap it in a helper class:

public static String removeLastCharRegex(String s) {
    return (s == null) ? null : s.replaceAll(".$", "");
}

Note that if a String ends with a newline then the above method will fail as “.” in regex matches any character except for line terminators.

Finally, let’s re-write the implementation with Java 8:

public static String removeLastCharRegexOptional(String s) {
    return Optional.ofNullable(s)
      .map(str -> str.replaceAll(".$", ""))
      .orElse(s);
}

6. Conclusion

In this short article, we’ve discussed different ways of removing only the last character of a String – some manual, some ready out of the box.

And, if we need more flexibility and we need to remove more characters, we can the more advanced solution with regular expressions.

As always, the code used throughout the article can be found over on GitHub.