String.format() format for last characters of a string

Question

is there a possibility to set a String.format argument such that the last N characters of the input are used, i.e. something like:

String s = String.format("%1${N}s", "abcdef");

so that s contains "def"? This is common in script languages where you can say

exp = "abcdef"
s = exp[-3]

EDIT

OK, so i don't want to format my data AND handle it when putting it into the String#format function. That's the whole point of the format description here. This format description represents a form of modularity, which is considerably broken if I have to format my input data beforehand although there is a formatter to come...

Answer 1

Unfortunately, even now (y2017) Java 8 Formatter doesn't support "substring".

You can try:

• Freemarker and slicing (substrings):

  // string 'abcde', evaluates to "bcd"
  <#assign s="abcde">
  ${s[1..3]}
  

• Spring Expression Language (SpEL) and expressions methods:

  // string literal 'abcde', evaluates to "bcd"
  ExpressionParser parser = new SpelExpressionParser();
  String sub = parser.parseExpression("'abcde'.substring(2, 4)").getValue(String.class);