Ruby: How to parse a string to pull something out and assign it to a variable

Question

I have a string that looks something like this:

"my name is: andrew"

I'd like to parse the string, pull out the name from the string, and assign it to a variable. How would I do this with Ruby?

Update:

The string I used as an example was only an example. The strings that I will be working with can change formats, so you can't rely on the colon being in the actual example. Here are a few examples that I'm working with:

"/nick andrew"     # command: nick, value: "andrew"
"/join developers" # command: join, value: "developers"
"/leave"           # command: leave, value: nil

I'd like to use some sort of regular expression to solve this (since the string can change formats), rather than splitting the string on certain characters or relying on a certain character position number.

Answer 1

Another way:

name = "my name is: andrew".split(/: */)[1] # => "andrew"

or

name = "my name is: andrew".split(/: */).last # => "andrew"

Breaking it down, first we break it into parts. The regular expression /: */ says a : followed by any number of spaces will be our splitter.

"my name is: andrew".split(/: */) # => ["my name is", "andrew"]

Then we select the second item:

["my name is", "andrew"][1] # => "andrew"