What is the preferred way of removing the last n characters from a string?
irb> 'now is the time'[0...-4]
=> "now is the "
If the characters you want to remove are always the same characters, then consider chomp:
'abc123'.chomp('123') # => "abc"
The advantages of chomp are: no counting, and the code more clearly communicates what it is doing.
With no arguments, chomp removes the DOS or Unix line ending, if either is present:
"abc\n".chomp # => "abc"
"abc\r\n".chomp # => "abc"
From the comments, there was a question of the speed of using #chomp versus using a range. Here is a benchmark comparing the two:
require 'benchmark'
S = 'asdfghjkl'
SL = S.length
T = 10_000
A = 1_000.times.map { |n| "#{n}#{S}" }
GC.disable
Benchmark.bmbm do |x|
x.report('chomp') { T.times { A.each { |s| s.chomp(S) } } }
x.report('range') { T.times { A.each { |s| s[0...-SL] } } }
end
Benchmark Results (using CRuby 2.13p242):
Rehearsal -----------------------------------------
chomp 1.540000 0.040000 1.580000 ( 1.587908)
range 1.810000 0.200000 2.010000 ( 2.011846)
-------------------------------- total: 3.590000sec
user system total real
chomp 1.550000 0.070000 1.620000 ( 1.610362)
range 1.970000 0.170000 2.140000 ( 2.146682)
So chomp is faster than using a range, by ~22%.
Ruby 2.5+
As of Ruby 2.5 you can use delete_suffix or delete_suffix! to achieve this in a fast and readable manner.
The docs on the methods are here.
If you know what the suffix is, this is idiomatic (and I'd argue, even more readable than other answers here):
'abc123'.delete_suffix('123') # => "abc"
'abc123'.delete_suffix!('123') # => "abc"
It's even significantly faster (almost 40% with the bang method) than the top answer. Here's the result of the same benchmark:
user system total real
chomp 0.949823 0.001025 0.950848 ( 0.951941)
range 1.874237 0.001472 1.875709 ( 1.876820)
delete_suffix 0.721699 0.000945 0.722644 ( 0.723410)
delete_suffix! 0.650042 0.000714 0.650756 ( 0.651332)
I hope this is useful - note the method doesn't currently accept a regex so if you don't know the suffix it's not viable for the time being. However, as the accepted answer (update: at the time of writing) dictates the same, I thought this might be useful to some people.
str = str[0..-1-n]
Unlike the [0...-n], this handles the case of n=0.
I would suggest chop. I think it has been mentioned in one of the comments but without links or explanations so here's why I think it's better:
It simply removes the last character from a string and you don't have to specify any values for that to happen.
If you need to remove more than one character then chomp is your best bet. This is what the ruby docs have to say about chop:
Returns a new String with the last character removed. If the string
ends with \r\n, both characters are removed. Applying chop to an empty
string returns an empty string. String#chomp is often a safer
alternative, as it leaves the string unchanged if it doesn’t end in a
record separator.
Although this is used mostly to remove separators such as \r\n I've used it to remove the last character from a simple string, for example the s to make the word singular.
name = "my text"
x.times do name.chop! end
Here in the console:
>name = "Nabucodonosor"
=> "Nabucodonosor"
> 7.times do name.chop! end
=> 7
> name
=> "Nabuco"
Dropping the last n characters is the same as keeping the first length - n characters.
Active Support includes String#first and String#last methods which provide a convenient way to keep or drop the first/last n characters:
require 'active_support/core_ext/string/access'
"foobarbaz".first(3) # => "foo"
"foobarbaz".first(-3) # => "foobar"
"foobarbaz".last(3) # => "baz"
"foobarbaz".last(-3) # => "barbaz"
if you are using rails, try:
"my_string".last(2) # => "ng"
[EDITED]
To get the string WITHOUT the last 2 chars:
n = "my_string".size
"my_string"[0..n-3] # => "my_stri"
Note: the last string char is at n-1. So, to remove the last 2, we use n-3.
Check out the slice() method:
http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.0/String.html#method-i-slice
You can always use something like
"string".sub!(/.{X}$/,'')
Where X is the number of characters to remove.
Or with assigning/using the result:
myvar = "string"[0..-X]
where X is the number of characters plus one to remove.
If you're ok with creating class methods and want the characters you chop off, try this:
class String
def chop_multiple(amount)
amount.times.inject([self, '']){ |(s, r)| [s.chop, r.prepend(s[-1])] }
end
end
hello, world = "hello world".chop_multiple 5
hello #=> 'hello '
world #=> 'world'
Using regex:
str = 'string'
n = 2 #to remove last n characters
str[/\A.{#{str.size-n}}/] #=> "stri"
x = "my_test"
last_char = x.split('').last
Related
I want to convert all the words(alphabetic) in the string to their abbreviations like i18n does. In other words I want to change "extraordinary" into "e11y" because there are 11 characters between the first and the last letter in "extraordinary". It works with a single word in the string. But how can I do the same for a multi-word string? And of course if a word is <= 4 there is no point to make an abbreviation from it.
class Abbreviator
def self.abbreviate(x)
x.gsub(/\w+/, "#{x[0]}#{(x.length-2)}#{x[-1]}")
end
end
Test.assert_equals( Abbreviator.abbreviate("banana"), "b4a", Abbreviator.abbreviate("banana") )
Test.assert_equals( Abbreviator.abbreviate("double-barrel"), "d4e-b4l", Abbreviator.abbreviate("double-barrel") )
Test.assert_equals( Abbreviator.abbreviate("You, and I, should speak."), "You, and I, s4d s3k.", Abbreviator.abbreviate("You, and I, should speak.") )
Your mistake is that your second parameter is a substitution string operating on x (the original entire string) as a whole.
Instead of using the form of gsub where the second parameter is a substitution string, use the form of gsub where the second parameter is a block (listed, for example, third on this page). Now you are receiving each substring into your block and can operate on that substring individually.
def short_form(str)
str.gsub(/[[:alpha:]]{4,}/) { |s| "%s%d%s" % [s[0], s.size-2, s[-1]] }
end
The regex reads, "match four or more alphabetic characters".
short_form "abc" # => "abc"
short_form "a-b-c" #=> "a-b-c"
short_form "cats" #=> "c2s"
short_form "two-ponies-c" #=> "two-p4s-c"
short_form "Humpty-Dumpty, who sat on a wall, fell over"
#=> "H4y-D4y, who sat on a w2l, f2l o2r"
I would recommend something along the lines of this:
class Abbreviator
def self.abbreviate(x)
x.gsub(/\w+/) do |word|
# Skip the word unless it's long enough
next word unless word.length > 4
# Do the same I18n conversion you do before
"#{word[0]}#{(word.length-2)}#{word[-1]}"
end
end
end
The accepted answer isn't bad, but it can be made a lot simpler by not matching words that are too short in the first place:
def abbreviate(str)
str.gsub(/([[:alpha:]])([[:alpha:]]{3,})([[:alpha:]])/i) { "#{$1}#{$2.size}#{$3}" }
end
abbreviate("You, and I, should speak.")
# => "You, and I, s4d s3k."
Alternatively, we can use lookbehind and lookahead, which makes the Regexp more complex but the substitution simpler:
def abbreviate(str)
str.gsub(/(?<=[[:alpha:]])[[:alpha:]]{3,}(?=[[:alpha:]])/i, &:size)
end
I am trying to match numeric characters by their place within a string. For example, in the string "1234567", I would like to select the second through the fourth characters: "234". "D9873Y.31" should also turn up "987". Would you have any suggestions?
You don’t need a regex, you can just use String#[]:
s = '1234567'
s[1..3] #=> "234"
s = 'D9873Y.31'
s[1..3] #=> "987"
You can use a regex for this, and, patterns are flexible enough to write them several different ways. I try to keep them very simple, because they can become maintenance nightmares due to their cryptic nature:
"1234567"[/^.(.{3})/, 1]
=> "234"
"D9873Y.31"[/^.(.{3})/, 1]
=> "987"
"1234567".match(/^.(.{3})/)[1]
=> "234"
"D9873Y.31".match(/^.(.{3})/)[1]
=> "987"
You can also take advantage of named-captures:
/^.(?<chars2_4>.{3})/ =~ "1234567"
chars2_4
=> "234"
/^.(?<chars2_4>.{3})/ =~ "D9873Y.31"
chars2_4
=> "987"
All that's nice, but it's really important to dig in and learn them well, because, done wrong, you can grab the wrong data, or worse, really slow your script by making the regex engine work very hard to do something simple.
For instance, I used ^ above. ^ matches the start of a line, which is the start of a string and the character immediately following a new-line. That's OK for a short string, but long strings, especially with embedded new-lines can slow down the engine. Instead you might want to use \A. The same situation applies to using $ or \Z or \z. This is from the Regexp documentation section for "Anchors":
^ - Matches beginning of line
$ - Matches end of line
\A - Matches beginning of string.
\Z - Matches end of string. If string ends with a newline, it matches just before newline
\z - Matches end of string
And all that is why you sometimes want to avoid using a regexp and instead use a substring such as #AndrewMarshall recommended.
Here's another reason why the simple substring way is preferable:
require 'benchmark'
N = 1_000_000
Benchmark.bm(13) do |b|
b.report('string index') { N.times {
"1234567"[1..3]
"D9873Y.31"[1..3]
} }
b.report('regex index') { N.times {
"1234567"[/^.(.{3})/, 1]
"D9873Y.31"[/^.(.{3})/, 1]
} }
b.report('match') { N.times {
"1234567".match(/^.(.{3})/)[1]
"D9873Y.31".match(/^.(.{3})/)[1]
} }
b.report('named capture') { N.times {
/^.(?<chars2_4>.{3})/ =~ "1234567"
/^.(?<chars2_4>.{3})/ =~ "D9873Y.31"
} }
b.report('look behind') { N.times {
"1234567"[/(?<=^.{2}).{3}/, 1]
"D9873Y.31"[/(?<=^.{2}).{3}/, 1]
} }
end
Which returns:
user system total real
string index 0.730000 0.000000 0.730000 ( 0.727323)
regex index 1.370000 0.000000 1.370000 ( 1.377121)
match 4.400000 0.000000 4.400000 ( 4.398849)
named capture 5.240000 0.010000 5.250000 ( 5.243799)
look behind 1.430000 0.000000 1.430000 ( 1.437286)
You can do it using a lookbehind with an anchor, example:
(?<=^.{2}).{3}
will give you 345
I want to know what's the best way to make the String.include? methods ignore case. Currently I'm doing the following. Any suggestions? Thanks!
a = "abcDE"
b = "CD"
result = a.downcase.include? b.downcase
Edit:
How about Array.include?. All elements of the array are strings.
Summary
If you are only going to test a single word against an array, or if the contents of your array changes frequently, the fastest answer is Aaron's:
array.any?{ |s| s.casecmp(mystr)==0 }
If you are going to test many words against a static array, it's far better to use a variation of farnoy's answer: create a copy of your array that has all-lowercase versions of your words, and use include?. (This assumes that you can spare the memory to create a mutated copy of your array.)
# Do this once, or each time the array changes
downcased = array.map(&:downcase)
# Test lowercase words against that array
downcased.include?( mystr.downcase )
Even better, create a Set from your array.
# Do this once, or each time the array changes
downcased = Set.new array.map(&:downcase)
# Test lowercase words against that array
downcased.include?( mystr.downcase )
My original answer below is a very poor performer and generally not appropriate.
Benchmarks
Following are benchmarks for looking for 1,000 words with random casing in an array of slightly over 100,000 words, where 500 of the words will be found and 500 will not.
The 'regex' text is my answer here, using any?.
The 'casecmp' test is Arron's answer, using any? from my comment.
The 'downarray' test is farnoy's answer, re-creating a new downcased array for each of the 1,000 tests.
The 'downonce' test is farnoy's answer, but pre-creating the lookup array once only.
The 'set_once' test is creating a Set from the array of downcased strings, once before testing.
user system total real
regex 18.710000 0.020000 18.730000 ( 18.725266)
casecmp 5.160000 0.000000 5.160000 ( 5.155496)
downarray 16.760000 0.030000 16.790000 ( 16.809063)
downonce 0.650000 0.000000 0.650000 ( 0.643165)
set_once 0.040000 0.000000 0.040000 ( 0.038955)
If you can create a single downcased copy of your array once to perform many lookups against, farnoy's answer is the best (assuming you must use an array). If you can create a Set, though, do that.
If you like, examine the benchmarking code.
Original Answer
I (originally said that I) would personally create a case-insensitive regex (for a string literal) and use that:
re = /\A#{Regexp.escape(str)}\z/i # Match exactly this string, no substrings
all = array.grep(re) # Find all matching strings…
any = array.any?{ |s| s =~ re } # …or see if any matching string is present
Using any? can be slightly faster than grep as it can exit the loop as soon as it finds a single match.
For an array, use:
array.map(&:downcase).include?(string)
Regexps are very slow and should be avoided.
You can use casecmp to do your comparison, ignoring case.
"abcdef".casecmp("abcde") #=> 1
"aBcDeF".casecmp("abcdef") #=> 0
"abcdef".casecmp("abcdefg") #=> -1
"abcdef".casecmp("ABCDEF") #=> 0
class String
def caseinclude?(x)
a.downcase.include?(x.downcase)
end
end
my_array.map!{|c| c.downcase.strip}
where map! changes my_array, map instead returns a new array.
To farnoy in my case your example doesn't work for me. I'm actually looking to do this with a "substring" of any.
Here's my test case.
x = "<TD>", "<tr>", "<BODY>"
y = "td"
x.collect { |r| r.downcase }.include? y
=> false
x[0].include? y
=> false
x[0].downcase.include? y
=> true
Your case works with an exact case-insensitive match.
a = "TD", "tr", "BODY"
b = "td"
a.collect { |r| r.downcase }.include? b
=> true
I'm still experimenting with the other suggestions here.
---EDIT INSERT AFTER HERE---
I found the answer. Thanks to Drew Olsen
var1 = "<TD>", "<tr>","<BODY>"
=> ["<TD>", "<tr>", "<BODY>"]
var2 = "td"
=> "td"
var1.find_all{|item| item.downcase.include?(var2)}
=> ["<TD>"]
var1[0] = "<html>"
=> "<html>"
var1.find_all{|item| item.downcase.include?(var2)}
=> []
I want to replace the last occurrence of a substring in Ruby. What's the easiest way?
For example, in abc123abc123, I want to replace the last abc to ABC. How do I do that?
How about
new_str = old_str.reverse.sub(pattern.reverse, replacement.reverse).reverse
For instance:
irb(main):001:0> old_str = "abc123abc123"
=> "abc123abc123"
irb(main):002:0> pattern="abc"
=> "abc"
irb(main):003:0> replacement="ABC"
=> "ABC"
irb(main):004:0> new_str = old_str.reverse.sub(pattern.reverse, replacement.reverse).reverse
=> "abc123ABC123"
"abc123abc123".gsub(/(.*(abc.*)*)(abc)(.*)/, '\1ABC\4')
#=> "abc123ABC123"
But probably there is a better way...
Edit:
...which Chris kindly provided in the comment below.
So, as * is a greedy operator, the following is enough:
"abc123abc123".gsub(/(.*)(abc)(.*)/, '\1ABC\3')
#=> "abc123ABC123"
Edit2:
There is also a solution which neatly illustrates parallel array assignment in Ruby:
*a, b = "abc123abc123".split('abc', -1)
a.join('abc')+'ABC'+b
#=> "abc123ABC123"
Since Ruby 2.0 we can use \K which removes any text matched before it from the returned match. Combine with a greedy operator and you get this:
'abc123abc123'.sub(/.*\Kabc/, 'ABC')
#=> "abc123ABC123"
This is about 1.4 times faster than using capturing groups as Hirurg103 suggested, but that speed comes at the cost of lowering readability by using a lesser-known pattern.
more info on \K: https://www.regular-expressions.info/keep.html
Here's another possible solution:
>> s = "abc123abc123"
=> "abc123abc123"
>> s[s.rindex('abc')...(s.rindex('abc') + 'abc'.length)] = "ABC"
=> "ABC"
>> s
=> "abc123ABC123"
When searching in huge streams of data, using reverse will definitively* lead to performance issues. I use string.rpartition*:
sub_or_pattern = "!"
replacement = "?"
string = "hello!hello!hello"
array_of_pieces = string.rpartition sub_or_pattern
( array_of_pieces[(array_of_pieces.find_index sub_or_pattern)] = replacement ) rescue nil
p array_of_pieces.join
# "hello!hello?hello"
The same code must work with a string with no occurrences of sub_or_pattern:
string = "hello_hello_hello"
# ...
# "hello_hello_hello"
*rpartition uses rb_str_subseq() internally. I didn't check if that function returns a copy of the string, but I think it preserves the chunk of memory used by that part of the string. reverse uses rb_enc_cr_str_copy_for_substr(), which suggests that copies are done all the time -- although maybe in the future a smarter String class may be implemented (having a flag reversed set to true, and having all of its functions operating backwards when that is set), as of now, it is inefficient.
Moreover, Regex patterns can't be simply reversed. The question only asks for replacing the last occurrence of a sub-string, so, that's OK, but readers in the need of something more robust won't benefit from the most voted answer (as of this writing)
You can achieve this with String#sub and greedy regexp .* like this:
'abc123abc123'.sub(/(.*)abc/, '\1ABC')
simple and efficient:
s = "abc123abc123abc"
p = "123"
s.slice!(s.rindex(p), p.size)
s == "abc123abcabc"
string = "abc123abc123"
pattern = /abc/
replacement = "ABC"
matches = string.scan(pattern).length
index = 0
string.gsub(pattern) do |match|
index += 1
index == matches ? replacement : match
end
#=> abc123ABC123
I've used this handy helper method quite a bit:
def gsub_last(str, source, target)
return str unless str.include?(source)
top, middle, bottom = str.rpartition(source)
"#{top}#{target}#{bottom}"
end
If you want to make it more Rails-y, extend it on the String class itself:
class String
def gsub_last(source, target)
return self unless self.include?(source)
top, middle, bottom = self.rpartition(source)
"#{top}#{target}#{bottom}"
end
end
Then you can just call it directly on any String instance, eg "fooBAR123BAR".gsub_last("BAR", "FOO") == "fooBAR123FOO"
.gsub /abc(?=[^abc]*$)/, 'ABC'
Matches a "abc" and then asserts ((?=) is positive lookahead) that no other characters up to the end of the string are "abc".
In Ruby language, how can I get the number of lines in a string?
There is a lines method for strings which returns an Enumerator. Call count on the enumerator.
str = "Hello\nWorld"
str.lines.count # 2
str = "Hello\nWorld\n" # trailing newline is ignored
str.lines.count # 2
The lines method was introduced in Ruby 1.8.7. If you're using an older version, checkout the answers by #mipadi and #Greg.
One way would be to count the number of line endings (\n or \r\n, depending on the string), the caveat being that if the string does not end in a new line, you'll have to make sure to add one to your count. You could do so with the following:
c = my_string.count("\n")
c += 1 unless c[-1,1] == "\n"
You could also just loop through the string and count the lines:
c = 0
my_string.each { |line| c += 1 }
Continuing with that solution, you could get really fancy and use inject:
c = my_string.each.inject(0) { |count, line| count += 1 }
string".split("\n").size works nicely. I like that it ignores trailing new-lines if they don't contain content.
"Hello\nWorld\n".split("\n") # => ["Hello", "World"]
"hello\nworld\nfoo bar\n\n".split("\n").size # => 3
That might not be what you want, so use lines() as #Anurag suggested instead if you need to honor all new-lines.
"hello\nworld\nfoo bar\n\n".lines.count # => 4
"hello\nworld\nfoo bar\n\n".chomp.split("\n",-1).size # => 4
String#chomp gets rid of an end of line if it exists, and the -1 allows empty strings.
given a file object (here, in rails)
file = File.open(File.join(Rails.root, 'lib', 'file.json'))
file.readlines.count
returns the number of lines
IO#readlines performs a split method on strings (IOStrings in this case) using newlines as the separator
This will not count blank lines:
string.split("\n").select{ |line| line != "" }.size