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

Have you tried a regex?

string.match(/(.{0,#{n}}$)/)
ending=$1

The regex captures as many characters it can at the end of the string, but no more than n. And stores it in $1.