Well, as lestrrat and busunsl said you can use substr to do this. I just wanted to say however that there are subtle differences between the two choices. Consider this:

$_="\n";
my ($letter) = /^(.)/;
print "Regex: '$letter'\n";
$letter=substr($_,0,1);
print "Substr:'$letter'\n";
[download]

The two do not produce the same results. Something to consider when you do convert, but not something to keep you from doing so. Using a regex for this type of task is incredible inefficient in comparison to substr.

Yves / DeMerphq
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