My immediate problem was checking a specific position in a string for a
specific value (if the char in the first position == '#', skip the
record). substr works OK in that case. However, I also want to learn
more and it seems regex is a better and more powerful answer.
Thank you,
Chuck
On Tue, 2009-09-01 at 21:55 -0400, Uri Guttman wrote:
> >>>>> "CC" == Chuck Crisler <charles.cris...@comcast.net> writes:
>
> CC> How do I access specific character positions in a scalar string? In case
> CC> it makes any difference, I specifically want to test the zeroth
> CC> character. Something like the following.
>
> CC> my $str = "abc";
> CC> if ($str[0] == '#')
> CC> {
> CC> do something...
> CC> }
>
> you already found substr. but i will guess your real need isn't to scan
> a string char by char or to directly index for a char. my suspicious
> nose tells me you are parsing a string and substr is the wrong way to do
> it. regexes will get you each char or more very easily. or you can split
> the string and loop over it that way. but calling substr for each char
> is clumsy and slow. if you want to know that the string begins with a
> char, this regex will do:
>
> $str =~ /^a/
>
> so ask your real question about string munging and not how to do a
> particular technique. this is called the XY problem where you think you
> want X but you really want Y.
>
> uri
>
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