Substring/Top and tail

Substring/Top and tail is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be found in its talk page.

The task is to demonstrate how to remove the first and last characters from a string. The solution should demonstrate how to obtain the following results:

• String with first character removed
• String with last character removed
• String with both the first and last characters removed

ZX Spectrum Basic

<lang zxbasic>10 PRINT FN f$("knight"): REM strip the first letter 20 PRINT FN l$("socks"): REM strip the last letter 30 PRINT FN b$("brooms"): REM strip both the first and last letter 100 STOP

9000 DEF FN f$(a$)=a$(2 TO LEN(a$)) 9010 DEF FN l$(a$)=a$(1 TO LEN(a$)-(1 AND (LEN(a$)>=1))) 9020 DEF FN b$(a$)=FN l$(FN f$(a$)) </lang>

Perl

<lang perl>print substr("knight",1), "\n"; # strip first character print substr("socks", 0, -1), "\n"; # strip last character print substr("brooms", 1, -1), "\n"; # strip both first and last characters</lang>

In perl, we can also remove the last character from a string variable with the chop function:

<lang perl>$string = 'ouch'; $bits = chop($string); # The last letter is returned by the chop function print $bits; # h print $string; # ouc # See we really did chop the last letter off</lang>