left characters of a string

if I have a name 'Microsoft', how can i get the first 6 characters 'Micros'?

Answer 1

[Andrei Bobrov]

name = 'Microsoft'
out = name(1:6)

[Real User]

What if name has < 6 characters?

Is there some short way or do have have to write

out = name(1:min(6,length(name)));

substr seems to require some stateflow package https://se.mathworks.com/help/stateflow/ref/substr.html

[Stephen23]

name = 'Microsoft';
name(1:min(end,6))

ans = 'Micros'

name = 'Cat';
name(1:min(end,6))

ans = 'Cat'

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

This wasn't an option when the question was originally asked, but the extractBefore function will work for both char vectors and string arrays.

c = 'Microsoft'

c = 'Microsoft'

c6 = extractBefore(c, 7)

c6 = 'Micros'

s = string(c)

s = "Microsoft"

s6 = extractBefore(s, 7)

s6 = "Micros"