Perl offers many ways to do that, depending on what you want to achieve. For example you could:

my @subArray = grep {/^x/} @foo;
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to get all the elements that contain a string starting with x. Or you could:

my @firstLetters = map {substr $_, 0, 1} @foo;
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to get an array of the first letter of each element in @foo. Or you could:

my @asLetters = map {[split '']} @foo;
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to get an array of arrays of individual letters - each @asLetters element is an array of the letters in the corresponding string from @foo.

Now, what was it you wanted?

for(@words)
{
     print chr ord $_;
}
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for(@foo){
    print "got x $_\n" if /^x/;
}
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Sometimes I wonder if we could do something like $foo[0][0], $foo[1][0], etc, things might become easier.
I always do my $first_char = (split ('', $foo[0]))[0]; when I met similar problems.

my $first_char = substr $foo[0], 0, 1;
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is much clearer, at least to my eye, probably executes faster and is faster to type too. What you might call a 'win win win' scenario.

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True laziness is hard work

Thanks for this, I have to say that this is much better than my way of doing it.
Mine's more or less a bad example. :)

say substr($foo[1], 1, 1);
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