# 7.3. Extracting characters from a string¶

Strings are called “strings” because they are made up of a sequence, or string, of characters. The first operation we are going to perform on a string is to extract one of the characters. C++ uses square brackets ([ and ]) for this operation.

Take a look at the active code below. We extract the character at index 1 from string fruit using [ and ].

The expression fruit[1] indicates that I want character number 1 from the string named fruit. The result is stored in a char named letter. When I output the value of letter, I get a surprise:

a


a is not the first letter of "banana". Unless you are a computer scientist. For perverse reasons, computer scientists always start counting from zero. The 0th letter (“zeroeth”) of "banana" is b. The 1th letter (“oneth”) is a and the 2th (“twoeth”) letter is n.

Note

In C++, indexing begins at 0!

If you want the the zereoth letter of a string, you have to put zero in the square brackets.

The active code below accesses the first character in string fruit.

Construct a block of code that correctly prints the letter “a”.