Hello,

What you want to do probably falls into one of these cases:

# dashes are just for illustration
my $str =                  "123456789";
my $ss = substr ($str,3);
print "$ss\n"; # will print ---456789
$ss = substr ($str,-3);
print "$ss\n"; # will print ------789
$ss = substr ($str,0,3);
print "$ss\n"; # will print 123------
$ss = substr ($str,0,-3);
print "$ss\n"; # will print 123456---
[download]

Check out perlfunc substr to know more about it since this function in particular has a very informative description with lots of examples.

Hope this helps,,,
Aziz,,,