parsing strings

[Greg . Froese]

Hi,

I've been programming for a number of years, but I'm VERY new to Perl, and 
it looks like a lot of fun.  However, I'm very much in the learning stage, 
so please be patient, I'm still learning all the keywords etc...

I'm curious how I can parse part of one variable into another

ex:
$part1 = "this is a great day"
# I want $part2 = the first four letters of $part1 (this)

how would I do this?