1) Wrong list. This list is for the folks who are currently implementing the new language Perl 6. You want [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to subscribe, and please send any followups there rather than here.
2) Strings in Perl are not objects, and there is no "String" class - Perl 5 is simply not that object-oriented. You don't say $str = new String("blah") (which would be redundant even in Java and Javascript, since the literal already constructs an object); you just say $str = "blah". Anyway, it looks like you already have a string variable in your example, namely $line[0]. 3) Since strings aren't objects, you don't call methods on them; you use functions instead. So it's not $str->length, but length($str). 4) There's no distinction between characters and strings in Perl; strings are not considered to be a collection of characters, but rather a fundamental type. So you can't index into the string. Instead, use the substr() function to pull out a substring of length 1: printf "The first character of the string is '%s'\n", substr($str,0,1); Also, since print() takes multiple arguments and concatenates them, and you can interpolate variables in strings, you don't need printf most of the time: print "The first character of the string is '", substr($str,0,1), "'\n"; ...although it is arguably clearer in this case. -- Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>