My first thought was charAt(), but that's Java.

Perl doesn't have those oh-so-convenient functions/classes found in PHP or Java. I guess because then everyone would want a function for everything under the sun, and we would get feature creep... On the other hand, people accuse us of trying to jam too much into Perl, while knocking us for not having more of these shortcuts which would (supposedly) reduce idiosyncracies and increase standardization and maintainability.

Oh wait, there's CPAN. That's right.