How to obtain the first letter in a Bash variable?

Question

I have a Bash variable, $word, which is sometimes a word or sentence, e.g.:

word=\"tiger\"

Or:

word=\"This is          


        

Answer 1

Since you have a sed tag here is a sed answer:

echo "$word" | sed -e "{ s/^\(.\).*/\1/ ; q }"

Play by play for those who enjoy those (I do!):

{

• s: start a substitution routine
  • /: Start specifying what is to be substituted
  • ^\(.\): capture the first character in Group 1
  • .*:, make sure the rest of the line will be in the substitution
  • /: start specifying the replacement
  • \1: insert Group 1
  • /: The rest is discarded;
• q: Quit sed so it won't repeat this block for other lines if there are any.

}

Well that was fun! :) You can also use grep and etc but if you're in bash the ${x:0:1} magick is still the better solution imo. (I spent like an hour trying to use POSIX variable expansion to do that but couldn't :( )