How to extract the first two characters of a string in shell scripting?

Question

For example, given:

USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805

I want to extract just:

US

Answer 1

Is this what your after?

my $string = 'USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805';

my $first_two_chars = substr $string, 0, 2;

ref: substr