CODEWITHSUNDEEP
java
Ant695
Ant695

Reputation: 71

How to check if the first 2 letters in a sting are a specific value

Edit Thanks for the help guys got it working now.

So I had a question to do to ask a user for first name and last name which I have done no problem but then I thought it's be good to expand the program so that if someone entered a surname like McCabe it would print T McC instead of TM. I'm just not sure about how to compare the first two letters of the secondname string to see if they are "mc".

public class InitialsAlt {

  public static void main(String [] args){

    Scanner keyboardIn = new Scanner (System.in);
    String firstname = new String();
    System.out.print (" Enter your first name ");
    firstname = keyboardIn.nextLine();
    String secondname = new String();
    System.out.print (" Enter your second name ");
    secondname = keyboardIn.nextLine();

   if(secondname.charAt(0, 1)== "mc" ) {
      System.out.print("Your initals are " + firstname.charAt(0)+    secondname.charAt(0,1,2)); 
   }

   else {
   System.out.print("Your initals are " + firstname.charAt(0)+ secondname.charAt(0));
   }

  }
}

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2938

Answers (5)

TheLostMind
TheLostMind

Reputation: 36304

Use yourString.toLowerCase().indexOf("mc")==0. This will involve creation of a new String only once (Since indexOf() doesn't create a new one, using indexOf() would be better than using subString() here)

Upvotes: 1

Andy Turner
Andy Turner

Reputation: 140318

The easiest way is to use String.startsWith:

yourString.toLowerCase().startsWith("mc")

If you want to avoid lowercasing the entire string or creating a new object, only to check the first two characters:

yourString.length() >= 2
&& Character.toLowerCase(yourString.charAt(0)) == 'm'
&& Character.toLowerCase(yourString.charAt(1)) == 'c'

However, I would use the former solution as it is far more readable, and the performance hit from lowercasing the entire string is almost certainly negligible, unless you are doing this on quite large strings.

Upvotes: 2

Tarik
Tarik

Reputation: 5021

If its case insensitive you could use the Apache Commons Lang library:

if(StringUtils.startsWithIgnoreCase(secondname, "mc") {
  // Do nice stuff
}

Otherwise, you can use:

if(StringUtils.startsWith(secondname.toLowerCase(), "mc") {
  // Do nice stuff
}

Upvotes: 1

Rabbit Guy
Rabbit Guy

Reputation: 1892

Use substring to get the first two letters, then convert to lowercase, then check to see if it equals:

String someString = "McElroy";
if (someString.subString(0,2).toLowerCase().equals("mc")) {
    //do something
}

Upvotes: 1

Reimeus
Reimeus

Reputation: 159754

if (secondName.toLowerCase().startsWith("mc")) {

Upvotes: 7

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