I prefer the 4-arg substr for this case:

    my $firstChar= substr($string,0,1,"");
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• It avoids copying of the string (it simply updates an offset to where the start of the string is -- for more fun with this trick see (tye)Re: Creative use of pack/unpack) -- some day Perl might be smart enough to optimize your code to act the same as my code, but it isn't that smart today
• It lets you save the removed character in a single step