Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.
Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:
There are many ways. If you just want to grab a copy, use
substr():
$first_byte = substr($a, 0, 1);
If you want to modify part of a string, the simplest way is often to use
substr()
as an lvalue:
substr($a, 0, 3) = "Tom";
Although those with a pattern matching kind of thought process will likely prefer:
$a =~ s/^.../Tom/;