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!