detect the first character in a variable c#

I have a program that reads in serial information from a device and that works fine but i want to make a statement something like; if (first character = R) do something if (first character = T) do something else

I hope this makes sense. Basically all i need to do is have a way to detect the f开发者_运维百科irst character from a variable, then remove that character from the variable.

Thanks

Assuming we are talking about a string:

string input = GetInput();
string remainingPart = input.Substring(1); // get string without first character
switch (input[0])
{
    case 'R':
        {
            DoSomething(remainingPart);
            break;
        }
    case 'T':
        {
            DoSomethingElse(remainingPart);
            break;
        }
    // more case clauses follow here
    default:
        {
            break;
        }
}

Is it a string variable? Then you can easily access it's first character:

string mystring = ...
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(mystring))
{
  char first = mystring[0];
  // ...

  string withoutFirst = mystring.Substring(1);
  // ...
}

String.StartsWith() : Determines whether the beginning of this string instance matches the specified string.
String.Substring() : Retrieves a substring from this instance. The substring starts at a specified character position.

If you need to read char and discard it, then I suggest that it is better for you to use Queue.

First, split the string into characters and queue it into a Queue. And then dequeue each item in the queue and process it as required.