From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder55@...>
Date: 2009-10-31T04:00:09+09:00
Subject: Re: How do you get the tail end of a string?

Bertram Scharpf wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Freitag, 30. Okt 2009, 13:25:05 +0900 schrieb Michael W. Ryder:
>> Michael W. Ryder wrote:
>>> Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
>>>>     I'm actually hoping this is an embarrassing question but how do you 
>>>> get the tail end of a string?  All I've figured out is this:
>>>>
>>>> index = 4
>>>> string[index, string.size - index]
>>>>
>>>>     ...but surely there's a better way.
>>>>
>>> You mean like string[-1]?
>> I'm sorry, I missed the part about the index number of characters.  Try 
>> string[-index, index].
> 
> That's really ugly. You shouldn't have to mention `index' twice.
> I would even support a language extension to solve this problem.
> 
> For my private use I wrote a suite of methods
> 
>   String#head
>   String#tail
>   String#starts_with
>   String#ends_with
> 

Just out of curiosity, do your methods work in a case like:
   a="123456"
   index = 12
   puts a(-index, index)

This is the only place where my code fails as it does not check to make 
sure that index is not greater than a.length.

> Probably I should make an own gem of it. I'll think about that
> this weekend. For so long have a look at my personal library:
> 
>   http://bertram-scharpf.homelinux.com:8808/doc_root/bs-ruby-2.7/rdoc/classes/String.html
> 
> By the way: Still I'm convinced that there should be a
> `String#notempty?' method corresponding to `Numeric#nonzero?'.
> 
> Bertram
> 
>