Extracting the last n characters from a ruby string

Question

To get the last n characters from a string, I assumed you could use

ending = string[-n..-1]

but if the string is less than

Answer 1

Well, the easiest workaround I can think of is:

ending = str[-n..-1] || str

(EDIT: The or operator has lower precedence than assignment, so be sure to use || instead.)