R – Why does “?b” mean ‘b’ in Ruby

UPDATE (Nov 24th, 2015):

This answer is originally posted in the year 2010 (SIX years back.) so please take note of these insightful comments:

• Shauna -

Update for Googlers - Looks like ECMA6 adds this function. The MDN article also shows a polyfill. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/endsWith

• T.J. Crowder -

Creating substrings isn't expensive on modern browsers; it may well have been in 2010 when this answer was posted. These days, the simple this.substr(-suffix.length) === suffix approach is fastest on Chrome, the same on IE11 as indexOf, and only 4% slower (fergetaboutit territory) on Firefox: jsperf.com/endswith-stackoverflow/14 And faster across the board when the result is false: jsperf.com/endswith-stackoverflow-when-false Of course, with ES6 adding endsWith, the point is moot. :-)

ORIGINAL ANSWER:

I know this is a year old question... but I need this too and I need it to work cross-browser so... combining everyone's answer and comments and simplifying it a bit:

String.prototype.endsWith = function(suffix) {
    return this.indexOf(suffix, this.length - suffix.length) !== -1;
};

• Doesn't create a substring
• Uses native indexOf function for fastest results
• Skip unnecessary comparisons using the second parameter of indexOf to skip ahead
• Works in Internet Explorer
• NO Regex complications

Also, if you don't like stuffing things in native data structure's prototypes, here's a standalone version:

function endsWith(str, suffix) {
    return str.indexOf(suffix, str.length - suffix.length) !== -1;
}

EDIT: As noted by @hamish in the comments, if you want to err on the safe side and check if an implementation has already been provided, you can just adds a typeof check like so:

if (typeof String.prototype.endsWith !== 'function') {
    String.prototype.endsWith = function(suffix) {
        return this.indexOf(suffix, this.length - suffix.length) !== -1;
    };
}

If you're using .NET 3.5 you can do this in a one-liner with LINQ:

int count = source.Count(f => f == '/');

If you don't want to use LINQ you can do it with:

int count = source.Split('/').Length - 1;

You might be surprised to learn that your original technique seems to be about 30% faster than either of these! I've just done a quick benchmark with "/once/upon/a/time/" and the results are as follows:

Your original = 12s
source.Count = 19s
source.Split = 17s
foreach (from bobwienholt's answer) = 10s

(The times are for 50,000,000 iterations so you're unlikely to notice much difference in the real world.)