[Perl] most efficient

[Gabor Szabo]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Shlomo Yona wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> What would be an efficient way to check if some scalar $string
> contains the character $character as it's first character?
> 
> I bet there are better ways than this:
> 
> 	if ($string=~/^$character/) {
> 		# do something
> 	}

This is another case when pattern matching should NOT be used.

if (substr($string,0,1) eq $character) {
   # rm -rf /
}


Gabor
ps. this does something, doesn't it ? :-()