in reply to Alternative to substr on unknown length of scalar

print pack( 'A6', $_ ) for 'this', 'and that';

this
and th

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Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom