Iterate over part of String in Swift - swift

Question

Why in the world are Swift String operations so complex and tiresome to work with?
I have to iterate over a String in reverse but ignoring the first char. Now this could be done like following:
var firstTime = true
for i in textBefore.characters.reversed() {
if firstTime {
firstTime = false
} else {
if String(i).personalFunction() {
// something
} else {
// something else
}
}
}
But really I just want to do something like:
textBefore = textBefore.characters.reversed()
for i in 1...textBefore.characters.count {
if textBefore.get(i).personalFunction() {
// something
} else {
// something else
}
}
So why can't we get index as int. And why is textBefore.characters.reversed() not a String or simply have String have a reverse function. All these issues just makes it so frustrating to work with Strings in Swift and makes us do stupid stuff as converting a String to an array of chars :S or stuff like my proposed solution above... Also we can't make for loops in the old fashion... I simply need some Swift guru to point my brain in the right direction for this stuff.

Answer 1

string.characters is a collection of characters.
Use reversed() to access the elements in reverse order, anddropFirst() to skip the initial element of the reversed collection:
let string = "a🇨🇷b😈"
for ch in string.characters.reversed().dropFirst() {
print(ch)
// `ch` is a Character. Use `String(ch)` if you need a String.
}
Output:
b
🇨🇷
a

Answer 2

You can do something like your second one. After you enter the for, you can just get the index directly from the string. In Swift, a string is just an array of characters.
textBefore = String(textBefore.characters.reversed())
for i in 1...textBefore.characters.count {
if textBefore[i].personalFunction() {
// something
} else {
// something else
}
}