$firstLetter = substr($string, 0, 1);

More info on:
   perldoc -f substr

-TK-

Are there anyone, who can tell me how to extract the first letter in a
string..

Thanks,
Thomas

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$firstLetter = substr($string, 1, 1);

/Daniel

And scratch your head in puzzlement as to why $firstLetter contains the
second letter in the string. :)

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#!perl

$string = "This is the first character";

$string =~ /(^.{1})/;

print $1,"\n";

$char = substr($string,0,1);

print $char,"\n";

__END__

And thats before deploying pack and sundry other little niceties.

We'll let the benchmark boys decide which one of these is most
efficient.

Next time read the FAQ its much more fun than getting flamed up here.

/J\
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Some of your questions answered:
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use Benchmark;
timethese(1000000,
    {
        SPURIOUS => sub { "This is the first character" =~ /(^.{1})/ },
        NORMAL   => sub { "This is the first character" =~ /^(.)/ },
    }
)
__END__
Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of NORMAL, SPURIOUS...
    NORMAL: 14 secs (15.24 usr  0.00 sys = 15.24 cpu)
  SPURIOUS: 18 secs (17.62 usr  0.00 sys = 17.62 cpu)

Probably not as meaningful as the extra second to type it.

--
Rick Delaney

-TK-

  ($firstLetter) = $string =~ /([^\W\d_])/;

be better if the original poster really wanted the first letter, not the
first character?

Mike

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/J\
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Some of your questions answered:
<URL:http://www.btinternet.com/~gellyfish/resources/wwwfaq.htm>

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       These are important issues, especially for languages other
       than English--but also for English: it would be naieve to
       imagine that A-Za-z defines all the "letters" needed to
       write in English.

\w and \W are locale aware, so the set of characters matched by

  [\W\d_]

are any characters which aren't alphabetic, numeric or _ in the current
locale (\W), any characters which are numeric (\d) and the _.  That's
everything *except* alphabetic characters, so [^\W\d_] matches just
alphabetic characters.

If you'll forgive the "non word" in the example (assuming you're reading
on an ISO8859-1 display):

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use locale;
use POSIX qw/locale_h/;

$string = '?ne';

($firstLetter) = $string =~ /([^\W\d_])/;
print "$firstLetter\n";

setlocale (LC_CTYPE, 'fr_FR.ISO8859-1') || die "selocale ($!)\n";

($firstLetter) = $string =~ /([^\W\d_])/;
print "$firstLetter\n";

__END__

produces

n
?

which seems reasonable, my default setup uses ASCII which doesn't consider
o-circumflex a letter.  This may or may not be useful considering the

Hope this helps,

Mike

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:> To expand on this a bit, what if I wanted to search out a keyword, within a
:> string, or text file, and change that keyword to something else, like make it
:> BOLD faced before displaying it to the page?
:>
:> How would you write this? Use split?
:>

Sed could probably do this faster than perl, but something
like:

$keyword = blah;
$cap_keyword = uc $keyword; # UPPER CASE keyword

$string =~ s/$keyword/$cap_keyword/g;

would be fairly simple.

- Al
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