in reply to stripping characters from a string

You might try reading the perlre and perlretut manpages.
You can follow the links above for an online reading or you can try it on your own shell/command prompt using:
perldoc perlre
perldoc perlretut

[download]


acid06
perl -e "print pack('h*', 16369646), scalar reverse $="

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom