From: Florian Gross <florgro@...>
Date: 2007-07-27T23:54:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Triming characters from the front of a String...

> For the life of me I can't figure out an easy way to remove the first
> couple of characters from a String. I looked in my Ruby book, searched
> online, and checked the documentation for the String class. I must be
> missing something obvious.

To remove all whitespace:
"    hello world".lstrip # => "hello world"

To remove the first n characters (destructively):
str = "hello world"
str.slice!(0, 5) # => "hello"
str # => " world"