Strings are immutable, meaning you can’t change a character. Instead, you create new strings.
What you are asking can be done several ways. The most appropriate solution will vary depending on the nature of the changes you are making to the original string. Are you changing only one character? Do you need to insert/delete/append?
Here are a couple ways to create a new string from an existing string, but having a different first character:
str="M" + str.Remove(0, 1);
str="M" + str.Substring(1);
Above, the new string is assigned to the original variable, str
.
I’d like to add that the answers from others demonstrating StringBuilder
are also very appropriate. I wouldn’t instantiate a StringBuilder
to change one character, but if many changes are needed StringBuilder
is a better solution than my examples which create a temporary new string in the process. StringBuilder
provides a mutable object that allows many changes and/or append operations. Once you are done making changes, an immutable string is created from the StringBuilder
with the .ToString()
method. You can continue to make changes on the StringBuilder
object and create more new strings, as needed, using .ToString()
.