I came across something with substr that struck me as odd.
The value from a substr assignment is not what character(s) were removed but what you assigned it to.
This strikes me as weird and somewhat useless. I would think (and thought) it would work like chop and return the deleted characters.

Is this a feature or a bug? I didn't see anything about what it should return in Programming Perl, but in Perl in a Nutshell it states...
"You can also specify a replacement string in the fourth parameter to replace the substring. The original extracted substring is still returned."

Am I reading this wrong? 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Example perl 5.6.1
my $string = '012345679ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV';
print $string,"\n";

my $result  = substr($string,2,6) = '';
print $result,"\n"; # Result is 9ABCDE

print $string,"\n";

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-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

In reply to Bug with substring return value? by shotgunefx

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