Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!uunet!hsi!mark
From: mark@hsi.UUCP (Mark Sicignano)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Getting at the first char of a string in Bourne shell
Message-ID: <2163@hsi86.hsi.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 90 16:12:24 GMT
References: <1308@ncrwat.Waterloo.NCR.COM> <9737@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1990Sep29.193617.25752@iwarp.intel.com>
Reply-To: mark@hsi.com (Mark Sicignano)
Organization: 3M Health Information Systems, Wallingford, CT.
Lines: 46

In article <9737@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>, lwall@jpl-devvax (Larry Wall) writes:
 >     perl -pe 'chop; s/./$&\n/g'
 > 
 > There are lots of other ways.
 >

In article <1990Sep29.193617.25752@iwarp.intel.com> merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) writes:
 >
 >a="Bourne" # pretend you already have it in $a
 >first=`expr "$a" : '\(.\).*'` # to get the first char
 >a=`expr "$a" : '.\(.*\)` # to trim the first char off
 >echo "$first $a"
 >
 >[no whitespace in $a, please]
 >
 >or even:
 >
 >a="Bourne" # pretend you already have it in $a
 >eval `echo "$a" | sed 's/\(.\)\(.*\)/first=\1 a="\2"/'`
 >echo "$first $a"
 >

Double ack!  These ways might work, but what about readability!

echo "Bourne" | awk '
{
	for (i = 0; i < length; i++) {
		print substr($0, i + 1, 1);
	}
}'

Produces:
B
o
u
r
n
e

That's what you want, right?

-mark
-- 
Mark Sicignano                                  ...!uunet!hsi!mark
3M Health Information Systems                   mark@hsi.com
--