From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-10-18T00:42:52+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the opposite of <<

On Saturday, October 16, 2010 06:00:39 pm Paul Roche wrote:
> But on a simple level......
> 
> 
> say in irb mode I did the following...
> 
> 
> name = "John"
> 
> name << " Smith"
> 
> => John Smith
> 
> 
> 
> Would it be possible to take "John" or "Smith" from name?

Not really, now that we know it's Strings. If it was Arrays, for instance:

name = []
name << 'John'
name << 'Smith'
name.first  # John
name.last   # Smith

But since it's strings... Let me put it this way:

name = "John Smith"

That's basically what you just did. Now, if you assume there's a space in 
there, you can do this:

name.split

...that will produce an array by splitting the string by whitespace. But that 
has nothing to do with the concatenation -- for example, if you do this:

name = 'John'
name << 'Smith'

Now name is 'JohnSmith', which means you'd need to look for some other way to 
tell them apart.

Josh Cheek's method certainly works if you still have lastname lying around...