NAME

Raku port of Perl's substr() built-in

SYNOPSIS

use P5substr; # exports substr()

say substr("foobar",3);   # bar
say substr("foobar",1,4); # ooba

my $a = "foobar";
substr($a,1,2) = "OO";
say $a;                   # fOObar

DESCRIPTION

This module tries to mimic the behaviour of Perl's substr built-in as closely as possible in the Raku Programming Language.

ORIGINAL PERL DOCUMENTATION

substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH,REPLACEMENT
substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH
substr EXPR,OFFSET
        Extracts a substring out of EXPR and returns it. First character
        is at offset zero. If OFFSET is negative, starts that far back
        from the end of the string. If LENGTH is omitted, returns
        everything through the end of the string. If LENGTH is negative,
        leaves that many characters off the end of the string.

            my $s = "The black cat climbed the green tree";
            my $color  = substr $s, 4, 5;      # black
            my $middle = substr $s, 4, -11;    # black cat climbed the
            my $end    = substr $s, 14;        # climbed the green tree
            my $tail   = substr $s, -4;        # tree
            my $z      = substr $s, -4, 2;     # tr

        You can use the substr() function as an lvalue, in which case EXPR
        must itself be an lvalue. If you assign something shorter than
        LENGTH, the string will shrink, and if you assign something longer
        than LENGTH, the string will grow to accommodate it. To keep the
        string the same length, you may need to pad or chop your value
        using "sprintf".

        If OFFSET and LENGTH specify a substring that is partly outside
        the string, only the part within the string is returned. If the
        substring is beyond either end of the string, substr() returns the
        undefined value and produces a warning. When used as an lvalue,
        specifying a substring that is entirely outside the string raises
        an exception. Here's an example showing the behavior for boundary
        cases:

            my $name = 'fred';
            substr($name, 4) = 'dy';         # $name is now 'freddy'
            my $null = substr $name, 6, 2;   # returns "" (no warning)
            my $oops = substr $name, 7;      # returns undef, with warning
            substr($name, 7) = 'gap';        # raises an exception

        An alternative to using substr() as an lvalue is to specify the
        replacement string as the 4th argument. This allows you to replace
        parts of the EXPR and return what was there before in one
        operation, just as you can with splice().

            my $s = "The black cat climbed the green tree";
            my $z = substr $s, 14, 7, "jumped from";    # climbed
            # $s is now "The black cat jumped from the green tree"

        Note that the lvalue returned by the three-argument version of
        substr() acts as a 'magic bullet'; each time it is assigned to, it
        remembers which part of the original string is being modified; for
        example:

            $x = '1234';
            for (substr($x,1,2)) {
                $_ = 'a';   print $x,"\n";    # prints 1a4
                $_ = 'xyz'; print $x,"\n";    # prints 1xyz4
                $x = '56789';
                $_ = 'pq';  print $x,"\n";    # prints 5pq9
            }

        With negative offsets, it remembers its position from the end of
        the string when the target string is modified:

            $x = '1234';
            for (substr($x, -3, 2)) {
                $_ = 'a';   print $x,"\n";    # prints 1a4, as above
                $x = 'abcdefg';
                print $_,"\n";                # prints f
            }

        Prior to Perl version 5.10, the result of using an lvalue multiple
        times was unspecified. Prior to 5.16, the result with negative
        offsets was unspecified.

AUTHOR

Elizabeth Mattijsen [email protected]

Source can be located at: https://github.com/lizmat/P5substr . Comments and Pull Requests are welcome.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 Elizabeth Mattijsen

Re-imagined from Perl as part of the CPAN Butterfly Plan.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the Artistic License 2.0.