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.

while(<FILE>) {
my @chars = split // ;
print $chars[0];
}

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

while(<FILE>) {
print $1 if(/^(.)/);     # take out the first character
}

[KevinADC]

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

$foo = "test";
$first = unpack('A1',$foo);
print $first;

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