Least significant character

Sometimes abbreviated as LSC, the Least Significant Character holds the smallest place value. In programming, it is the character located at the far right end of a string. As a numeric example, with 123, "3" is the least significant character. To use the word "Hope" as an example, the letter "e" at the end is the LSC.

As you may have guessed, characters become more significant as you move from right to left through a string of numbers or letters. For example, with the number "4,567" and examining it right to left, "6" is more significant than "7," and "5" is more significant than "6."

Extract LSC in Microsoft Excel

In a Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet, to get the least significant character of a cell, use the RIGHT function and a formula similar to the following example.

=RIGHT([cell],1)

In the formula, replace [cell] with the cell name containing the word or number from which you want to extract the LSC. For example, if the word "Hope" is in cell A2, the formula is =RIGHT(A2,1), and "e" is displayed in the cell containing that formula.

Substitute the least significant character with a regex

Matching is performed from left to right in programming and with a regular expression. In the example, we use a greedy substitute operation to match everything up to the least significant character we want to find, which in this example is the last "p."

use strict;
my $example = "Computer Hope";
$example =~ s/(.*)p/\1X/;
print "Result: $example\n";

In our example, instead of matching the "p" in "Computer," it would match the "p" in "Hope" and would print "Result: Computer HoXe."

Character, Computer acronyms, Least significant bit, Least significant digit, Most significant character, TLA