Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

How would one go about getting the first char of a scalar string? For example:

my $test = "Hello World!";
print $test[0];

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(That's what I would do in Python, with Python syntax of course).

What is the best way to do this in Perl?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: first char of string?
by vroom (His Eminence) on Mar 11, 2000 at 03:31 UTC
    take a look at the substr function it's usage is as follows: to get at it you just do something like: 
    substr($mystring,0,1);
#the first parameter is your string.. the second is the start index, a
+nd the third is the length of your substring

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    vroom | Tim Vroom | vroom@cs.hope.edu
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[d/l]
Re: first char of string?
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 13, 2000 at 11:20 UTC
    You could use a regex as well:
      $_="Hello World!";
$_ =~ /^(.)/;
print "The first character is:  $1\n";

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    This will snag any character, including embedded tabs, newlines, etc, etc. However, it is not as efficient as using substr (substr is a bit more than twice as fast in my tests).
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[d/l]
RE: first char of string?
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 11, 2000 at 03:27 UTC
    To get the first character of a string, use substr() my $test = "Hello World!"; print substr($test,0,1);
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RE: first char of string?
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 11, 2000 at 10:07 UTC
    The easiest way would be to pull a substring of the scalar, thusly: $string = "I *AM* the binary bitch goddess!"; $test_string = substr($string,0,1); print $test_string;
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Re: first char of string?
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 13, 2000 at 10:51 UTC
    Since everyone has given the direct answer, here a few other ways of doing it:

    Regex:

    $string =~ m!^(.).+$!;
    my $first = $1;

    Split:

    my @list = split('', $string); # I can't recall if '' works
    $list[0]; # but I think that is right.

    Really funky:

    $string = reverse($string);
    my $char = chop $string;
    # and if you need the string intact still
    $string .= $char;
    $string = reverse($string);

    There is more than one way to do it.

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      you could do it even shorter: ($char) = split("",$string);
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