Stripping characters from strings
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
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Q:
I need to strip the last 8 characters from a string. According to the
documentation, one can use "<-1" as start to get an "offset from the
last character towards the start of the string" ... If I use that in a
string-manipulation, the driver hard-stops.
A:
If you want just the last 8 characters, then use start="-9" length="8".
If you want everything but 8 characters, then use start="0" length="-9".
The < -1 in the documentation indicates the range of numbers that are less than -1 rather than the literal string "<-1". For "start," this means -2 starts 1 characters from the end, -3 starts 2 characters from the
end, etc. For length, -1 means the whole length the original string, -2
is the whole length -1, -3 the whole length -2.
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