If you're looking for something truncate the string, then you might want to look into the pack function. It has the added advantage of right-padding the string with blanks: 
use strict;
my $str = "1234";

my $ss = pack "A2", $str;
print "'$ss'\n";

### example shows example of padding blanks
$ss = pack "A5", $str;
print "'$ss'\n";

[download]
Produces: 
'12'
'1234 '

[download]

--Jim

In reply to Re: reversing substr by jlongino
in thread reversing substr by DaWolf

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