How to get first n characters of a string in Ruby

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first n characters of a string in Ruby.

Consider, we have the following string:

month = "august"

Now, we want to get the first 3 characters aug from the above string.

Getting the first n characters

To access the first n characters of a string in ruby, we can use the square brackets syntax [] by passing the start index and length.

Here is an example, that gets the first 3 characters from the month string:

month = "august"
firstThree = month[0, 3]

puts firstThree

Output:

"aug"

In the example above, we have passed the [0, 3] to it. so it starts the extraction at index position 0, and extracts before the position 3.