How to Extract a Substring from a String in Ruby

09/21/2021

Contents

In this article, you will learn how to extract a substring from a string in Ruby.

Extracting a substring from a string

In Ruby, you can extract a substring from a string using the slice or [] method. Here’s an example:

string = "Hello, world!"
substring = string.slice(0, 5)   # "Hello"

In the above example, slice takes two arguments: the starting index and the length of the substring. Alternatively, you can use [] method like below:

string = "Hello, world!"
substring = string[0, 5]   # "Hello"

Here, [] also takes two arguments: the starting index and the length of the substring. You can also use a range of indices to extract a substring:

string = "Hello, world!"
substring = string[0..4]   # "Hello"

Here, the .. operator creates a range from the starting index to the ending index, inclusive.

You can also use regular expressions to extract substrings that match a specific pattern:

string = "Hello, world!"
substring = string[/\w+/]   # "Hello"

In this example, the regular expression \w+ matches one or more word characters (letters, digits, and underscores). The [] method returns the first match it finds.

Here are a few more details on extracting substrings in Ruby:

  • You can use negative indices to start from the end of the string. For example:

    string = "Hello, world!"
substring = string[-6..-2]   # "world"

  • If you only need to extract a single character, you can use the [] method with a single index:

    string = "Hello, world!"
char = string[1]   # "e"

  • If you want to extract a substring starting from a specific index to the end of the string, you can omit the length argument:

    string = "Hello, world!"
substring = string[7..]   # "world!"
  • The slice and [] methods are equivalent and can be used interchangeably. You can choose the one that you find more readable.

  • If you need to extract multiple substrings that match a pattern, you can use the scan method with a regular expression:

    string = "Hello, world!"
matches = string.scan(/\w+/)   # ["Hello", "world"]

    In this example, the scan method returns an array of all matches of the regular expression \w+.

#Ruby