Get the last n characters of a string in Ruby

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

Consider, we have the following string:

name = "alisha"

Now, we need to get the last 3 characters sha from the above string.

In Ruby, strings are a sequence of characters, where the first character index is [0], the second character index [1], etc and negative indexes are used to access the characters from the end of a string.

Getting the last 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.

Note: Negative index gets the data from the end of a string.

Here is an example, that gets the last 3 characters sha from the following string:

name = "alisha"
lastThreeChars = name[-3 ,3]

puts lastThreeChars

Output:

"sha"

In the example above, we have passed the name[-3, 3] to the square brackets syntax.Where ‘-3’ is start index, so, it begins the character extraction from the end of a string and extracts upto 3 characters from the start index.