How to replace the last occurrence of a substring in ruby?

Question

I want to replace the last occurrence of a substring in Ruby. What\'s the easiest way? For example, in abc123abc123, I want to replace the last abc

Answer 1

When searching in huge streams of data, using reverse will definitively* lead to performance issues. I use string.rpartition*:

sub_or_pattern = "!"
replacement = "?"
string = "hello!hello!hello"

array_of_pieces = string.rpartition sub_or_pattern
( array_of_pieces[(array_of_pieces.find_index sub_or_pattern)] =  replacement ) rescue nil
p array_of_pieces.join
# "hello!hello?hello"

The same code must work with a string with no occurrences of sub_or_pattern:

string = "hello_hello_hello"
# ...
# "hello_hello_hello"

*rpartition uses rb_str_subseq() internally. I didn't check if that function returns a copy of the string, but I think it preserves the chunk of memory used by that part of the string. reverse uses rb_enc_cr_str_copy_for_substr(), which suggests that copies are done all the time -- although maybe in the future a smarter String class may be implemented (having a flag reversed set to true, and having all of its functions operating backwards when that is set), as of now, it is inefficient.

Moreover, Regex patterns can't be simply reversed. The question only asks for replacing the last occurrence of a sub-string, so, that's OK, but readers in the need of something more robust won't benefit from the most voted answer (as of this writing)