From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2003-11-20T07:46:02+09:00
Subject: Re: String startswith/endswith in Ruby?

gabriele renzi wrote:

>>While using a regex to do something so simple seems a bit excessive, looking for a value at the start or end of a string is really just a special case of a more general problem, which regex matching solves very neatly.
> 
> 
> well, IMO It is less error prone, may be implemented in a faster way,

True.  I must say, I was surprised there weren't built-in methods for these.

> and is more clear to the casual reader. 

I guess what I was getting at is that regexes are such a useful tool that I would hope most Ruby programmers would be pretty conversant with them ... and the necessary regexes in this case are about as simple as you can get.

> Plus, like every builtin it avoide reinventing the weel.

Of course, they're not very big wheels :-).

> Did you noticed 4 people gave 3 different answers?

Although, there were really only two, since "s =~ /^Hello/" is syntactic sugar for "/^Hello/.matches(s)".

Ie, there were "use regexes" or "use this extension".
 
> another quick way to do it :
>  if 'ciao'[/iao$/]

TMTOWTDI ... put it down to Matz providing perl compatibility :-).