Direct indexing of function return value in Fortran

Question

Is there possibility to use indexing directly on a function\'s return value? Something like this:

readStr()(2:5)

where readStr()

Answer 1

You can avoid declaring another variable if you use associate. Whether it is any better or clearer than a temporary variable must be decided by the user. The result has to be stored somewhere anyway.

 associate(str=>readStr())
   print *, str(2:5)
 end associate

It will not be very useful for this specific case with a potentially long string but might be more useful for other similar cases that get linked here as duplicates.