"Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder55 / gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:eKKHm.15$b_.6 / newsfe13.iad...
> Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
>> "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder55 / gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:FBGHm.79$sY5.70 / newsfe17.iad...
>>> Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
>>>> "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder55 / gmail.com> wrote in message 
>>>> news:d3oHm.2522$1R3.528 / newsfe18.iad...
>>>>> What method doesn't work?  If you mean the string[-index, index] 
>>>>> method it does work fine for me.  I am using 1.9.1 if that makes any 
>>>>> difference. The string[-index..-1] method does the same thing but I 
>>>>> have used Business Basic for over 20 years so my method was easier for 
>>>>> me.
>>>>     In retrospect, I'm surprised I put it so harshly but it doesn't do 
>>>> the same thing as the other method.  Your solution requires that you 
>>>> know how long a tail you need.  If, instead, you know how much of the 
>>>> head you need to remove but don't know or care how long the tail is, 
>>>> your method is insufficient...
>>>>
>>>>
>>> If all you wanted was the last character of a string then using 
>>> string[-1,1] does the same thing as string[-1..1] with less typing. This 
>>> was my original solution but seeing the index in your OP I thought you 
>>> wanted to take the last x number of characters from a string so offered 
>>> the other solution. In fact using 1.9.1 you can simplify this to just 
>>> string[-1].
>>
>>     I saw that.  I'm not sure what it was about an index that made you 
>> think that I wanted the last x number of characters but that the second 
>> parameter was string.size - 1 should have tipped you off as to what was 
>> known and what was desired...
> I saw this in your original post, maybe it came over changed going through 
> the newsgroup filter:
>
> |I'm actually hoping this is an embarrassing question but how do you get
> |the tail end of a string?  All I've figured out is this:
> |
> |index = 4
> |string[index, string.size - index]
>
> Since index seemed to be set to an arbitrary value I thought you wanted 
> the last 4 characters of the string.  I do something similar a lot when 
> parsing variables containing city, state, and zip code in one field.  I 
> parse out the last 5 characters for the zip code and then assume that the 
> last two non-blank characters are the state abbreviation, and the 
> remainder is the city name.
> Otherwise I could not understand what you were trying to do with your 
> code.  Sorry for the confusion.

    What I most recently posted was my mistake (and too big a mistake to 
call a typo).  You are correct in quoting my first post.
    I can see how you could interpet the original code to get the last n 
characters of a string since it does, after all, return the tail end of 
strings.  However, the variable index can't possibly represent the length of 
the tail you want to retrieve.  Indeed, the first parameter of the .[] 
method represents the index into the string starting from the front...