I'm not particularly fond of the extra trip through the sub when we could use a lexical to store the data: 
sub first_x {
    my @data = ( split /\s+/, $_[0], $_[1] + 1 )[ 0 .. $_[1] - 1 ];
    return
        wantarray
        ? @data
        : join ' ' , @data
        ;
}

[download]
then again, I don't like the 0..n slice. Why not just use pop? 
sub first_x {
    my @data = split /\s+/, $_[0], $_[1] + 1 ;
    pop(@data); #throw away last element    
    return
        wantarray
        ? @data
        : join ' ' , @data
        ;
}

[download]
peace, spazm

In reply to Re^3: Truncate Data from MySQL by spazm
in thread Truncate Data from MySQL by rich731

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