Ruby: Split string at character, counting from the right side

Question

Short version -- How do I do Python rsplit() in ruby?

Longer version -- If I want to split a string into two parts (name, suffix) at the first '.' character, this does the job nicely:

name, suffix = name.split('.', 2) 

But if I want to split at the last (rightmost) '.' character, I haven't been able to come up with anything more elegant than this:

idx = name.rindex('.') name, suffix = name[0..idx-1], name[idx+1..-1] if idx 

Note that the original name string may not have a dot at all, in which case name should be untouched and suffix should be nil; it may also have more than one dot, in which case only the bit after the final one should be the suffix.

Answer 1

String#rpartition does just that:

name, match, suffix = name.rpartition('.') 

It was introduced in Ruby 1.8.7, so if running an earlier version you can use require 'backports/1.8.7/string/rpartition' for that to work.