Question

I am just unable to find “truncate a string to a specific length” in Perl.
Is there any built in way?

UPDATE:

input: $str = "abcd";

output (truncate for 3 characters): $str is abc

Answer 1

You want to use the substr() function.

$shortened = substr( $long, 0, 50 ); # 50 characters long, starting at the beginning.

For more, use perldoc

perldoc -f substr

In your case, it would be:

$str = 'abcd';
$short = substr( $str, 0, 3 );