title: camel substring operation- n characters from end of message body
body: <p>This will probably be a layup for most of you, so I apologize in advance.
  I am using Apache camel with spring DSL.
  My message body has been converted to a string. I want everything from the 9th to 998th character, preferably using a simple expression.  I have tried</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;transform&gt;
    &lt;simple&gt;${body.substring(8,${body.length}-1)}&lt;/simple&gt;
  &lt;/transform&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but Camel doesn't recognize the subtraction. As such, it will try to convert the string <code>"1045-2"</code> to an integer, and obviously fail.  Is there a workaround here?</p>