Fastest way to remove first char in a string

Question

Say we have the following string

string data= "/temp string";

If we want to remove the first character / we can do by alot of ways such as :

data.Remove(0,1);
data.TrimStart('/');
data.Substring(1);

But .. really I don't know which one have the best algorithm and doing that faster ..
Is there a one that is the best or all are the same ?

Answer 1

You could profile it, if you really cared. Write a loop of many iterations and see what happens. Chances are, however, that this is not the bottleneck in your application, and TrimStart seems the most semantically correct. Strive to write code readably before optimizing.

Answer 2

I'd guess that Remove and Substring would tie for first place, since they both slurp up a fixed-size portion of the string, whereas TrimStart does a scan from the left with a test on each character and then has to perform exactly the same work as the other two methods. Seriously, though, this is splitting hairs.

Answer 3

The second option really isn't the same as the others - if the string is "///foo" it will become "foo" instead of "//foo".

The first option needs a bit more work to understand than the third - I would view the Substring option as the most common and readable.

(Obviously each of them as an individual statement won't do anything useful - you'll need to assign the result to a variable, possibly data itself.)

I wouldn't take performance into consideration here unless it was actually becoming a problem for you - in which case the only way you'd know would be to have test cases, and then it's easy to just run those test cases for each option and compare the results. I'd expect Substring to probably be the fastest here, simply because Substring always ends up creating a string from a single chunk of the original input, whereas Remove has to at least potentially glue together a start chunk and an end chunk.