Problem with removing letters from string

[renderiza]

How can I remove the first four letters of a string?

Here is a test that is giving me strange result...

a = "hello there"
a[1] #=> "101"

I was expecting this...

a = "hello there"
a[1] #=> "e"

What I am doing wrong?

[renderiza]

This one seems to work.

a = "hello there"
a[1,1] #=> "e"

[slbaumgartner]

@renderiza said:

How can I remove the first four letters of a string?

Here is a test that is giving me strange result...

a = "hello there"
a[1] #=> "101"

I was expecting this...

a = "hello there"
a[1] #=> "e"

What I am doing wrong?

a[1] returns the character in the second position of the string, and in the version of Ruby embedded in SketchUp a character is displayed as its numeric value, not its ASCII representation. You can use a[1].chr to get a string containing the ASCII.

In your second example, a[1,1] is a length 1 slice from the string, which is also a string (not a character) so it displays as a string.

[Dan Rathbun]

Be careful, ... in Ruby 1.9+ they changed the [ ] method to return what we all expect an index to return.

try using a range:
a = "hello there" b = a[4..-1] %(#804000)[>> "o there"]

[renderiza]

thank you guys!

Here is what I ended up using to eliminate first four letters...

"sting"[4,100] #=> "g"

[tt_su]

I would recommend you use Dan suggestions as it's always correct. You example will fail when you feed it a string that's over 100 characters. And it's not a good practice to give out of range values.

[renderiza]

@tt_su said:

I would recommend you use Dan suggestions as it's always correct. You example will fail when you feed it a string that's over 100 characters. And it's not a good practice to give out of range values.

Will replace the code to Dan is suggestion for the next update of "Rename by Layer" plugin.

Thanks!

[TIG]

BUT be aware that non-ASCII accented characters etc are actually 'two-bits'...
So then
**a = "héllo there"** héllo there **b = a[4..-1]** lo there

BUT all is not lost:
**a = "hello there" b = a.split('')** ["h", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "t", "h", "e", "r", "e"]
AND
**a = "héllo there" b = a.split('')** ["h", "é", "l", "l", "o", " ", "t", "h", "e", "r", "e"]
SO THEN
**b = a.split('')[4..-1].join('')** o there
should do it, even with strings containing non-ASCII characters

[tt_su]

@tig said:

should do it, even with strings containing non-ASCII characters

Interesting - split uses regex functions, which is to an extent in Ruby 1.8 aware of Unicode.

[renderiza]

@tig said:

SO THEN
**b = a.split('')[4..-1].join('')** o there
should do it, even with strings containing non-ASCII characters

Great advice!...thank you guys!