substr

STRINGsubstrSTRINGsINTEGERoffsetINTEGERlength

Available inall subroutines.

Returns a substring of the byte string s, starting from the byte offset, of byte length. The substring is a copy of the original bytes.

The length parameter is optional. If it's not specified, it means until the end of the string.

The offset parameter is zero-based. For example, substr("abcdefg", 0, 3) is "abc".

If the requested range is partially outside the string s, the returned string is truncated. For example, substr("abcdefg", 5, 3) is "fg".

If the requested range is completely outside the string s, an unset value is returned. For example, substr("abc", 4, 2) returns an unset value, the edge case substr("abc", 3, 2) being "".

A negative offset counts backwards from the end of the string s. For example, substr("abcdefg", -3, 2) is "ef".

A negative length counts backwards from the end of the string s with the offset taken into account. For example, substr("abcdefg", 1, -3) is "bcd" and substr("abcdefg", -4, -3) is "de".

An unset value is also returned in the extreme edge cases of the offset or length causing integer overflows.

IMPORTANT: substr does not correctly handle UTF-8 encoded Unicode strings because byte offsets and lengths are likely to result in invalid UTF-8. Use utf8.substr to handle UTF-8 encoded Unicode strings.

Examples

log "left=" substr("foobar", 0, 3)
log "middle=" substr("foobar", 2, 3)
log "right=" substr("foobar", -3)

Try it out

substr is used in the following code examples. Examples apply VCL to real-world use cases and can be deployed as they are, or adapted for your own service. See the full list of code examples for more inspiration.

Click RUN on a sample below to provision a Fastly service, execute the code on Fastly, and see how the function behaves.

Extract a substring from a string value

Isolate a portion of a string identified by a range of characters.

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Block or identify syntactically invalid requests at the edge by using a hash function of your choice.