Here is an efficient snippet that I posted a while back, complete with benchmark: Read the first character of a string. 

    $char = chr ord $string;

[download]

But if you don't care what the character actually is you could just use ord (as tye shows above).

--
John.

In reply to Re: Matching First Character of Strings Efficiently by jmcnamara
in thread Matching First Character of Strings Efficiently by Limbic~Region

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