File handling doubt

lilly07

I have a file with 100 lines. They are all alphabets of 40 in length in each line. How to grab the first character of every line. I can't use the splait function as they are no delimiters. Do i have add every line into an array and get the 0th element? Any other nicer way to do?
Thanks.

nithinpes

You can make use of split function without any delimiter, so that split occurs after each character.

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while(<FILE>) {

my @chars = split // ;

print $chars[0];

}

Better approach would be to use a regular expression as below:

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while(<FILE>) {

print $1 if(/^(.)/);     # take out the first character

}

KevinADC

unpack() would be the best function for this purpose:

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 $foo = "test";

$first = unpack('A1',$foo);

print $first;

much faster than any regexp or substr() which would have been the second best option.

File handling doubt

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