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

To get the last n characters from a string, you could do this

a[-n, n] if a is the array.

Here's and example if you would want one.

ruby-1.9.2-p180 :006 > a = "911234567890"

=> "911234567890"

ruby-1.9.2-p180 :009 > a[-5,5]

=> "67890"

ruby-1.9.2-p180 :010 > a[-7,7]

=> "4567890"

Answer 2

Here you have a one liner, you can put a number greater than the size of the string:

"123".split(//).last(5).to_s

For ruby 1.9+

"123".split(//).last(5).join("").to_s

For ruby 2.0+, join returns a string

"123".split(//).last(5).join