remove everything before the last occurrence of a character

Question

I\'m trying to perform the following action on a string :

• find the last occurrence of the character \"/\";
• remove everything before that

Answer 1

Personally I'd use a regular expression:

var result = string.replace(/^.*\/(.*)$/, "$1");

If you're familiar with regular expressions (and you should be if not :-) then it's not as alien-looking as it is when they're unfamiliar.

The leading ^ forces this regular expression to "anchor" the match at the start of the string. The \/ matches a single / character (the \ is to keep the / from confusing the regular expression parser). Then (.*)$ matches everything else from the / to the end of the string. The initial .* will swallow up as much as it can, including / characters before the last one. The replacement text, "$1", is a special form that means "the contents of the first matched group". This regex has a group, formed by the parentheses around the last .* (in (.*)$). That's going to be all the stuff after the last /, so the overall result is that the whole string is replaced by just that stuff. (If the pattern doesn't match because there aren't any / characters, nothing will happen.)