How to remove the first character of a ruby string

Recently, I had to remove the first character of string in a private nanoc-powered project.

 

 I easily found a quick and elegant way to achieve this and according to this stackoverflow answer it seems the fastest.

  path="_theString"
  path[1..-1]  # => "theString"

And to complete this post, if you plan to use this often and you want to remove one or more leading letters, you may want to override the String class to remove the first n characters :

class String
  def removeFirstChars!(how_many = 1)
    self.replace self[how_many..-1]
  end
end

And you can use it on every String variable :

str="Aze"
str.removeFirstChars!
# => ze
#  or
str.removeFirstChars! 2
# => e

The stackoverflow answer also gives the code and benchmark results to achieve this with an Array In this initial post, the function is called eat and it shows several other useful utility functions.