I want to extract a character from a string.
For a C/C++ programmer like me, this would seem to be the most logical and reasonable way--but it doesn't work:

$s = "abcdefg";
$c = $s[2];

$s = "abcdefg";
$c = substr($s, 2, 1);

In Perl, strings aren't character arrays like in C (C++ btw has a separate String class too) and can't be manipulated by character. One other way would be to use

$c=((split //, $s)[2]);

Thanks, pludi. Though that one looks nearly as clumsy. And looking at it makes me fear perl would convert the whole string to an integer array before plucking one character out.

It's surprising that perl can be so remarkably terse in many ways, but clumsy in at least this one.

are you sure you always want the character at second position in the string? a more perlish way is to write a regex and use the m operator to extract the character(s) you want. but yes depends on your requirement what exactly you are trying to achieve

This is a representative sample of what I'm doing:

    my $chars = "!#&'()*+.:=@[]^_`{|}~";
    for (my $i = 0;  $i < $char_count;  $i++) {
        printf("\"" . substr($chars,$i,1) . " some other text %d, %d\",\n", $a, $b);
        # ...
    }

Ah, a nice example for TMTOWTDI:

my $chars = "!#&'()*+.:=@[]^_`{|}~";
foreach my $char ( split //, $chars ) {
    printf( "\"" . $char . " some other text %d, %d\",\n", $a, $b );
    # ...
}

But $char_count is usually less than the number of chars in the string.