I had a case where the string was not supposed to show a suffix. String looked like “GOWANUS-ZK-1” and I had to loose ”-1” part. Of course right away I flexed my regex muscles and in the end got the following:
(generator.longname =~ /-1/ ? generator.longname.gsub('-1','') : generator.longname)
cryptic isnt it?
This is how this can be replaced with sql or select statment using rails.
Generator.find(:all,:select => "REPLACE(longname,'-1','') as longname")
More on the REPLACE function can be found here