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

Just for the sake of fun Ill add a few that, although they are over complicated and useless, they were not mentioned :

head -c 2 <( echo 'USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805')

echo 'USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805' | dd bs=2 count=1 status=none

sed -e 's/^\(.\{2\}\).*/\1/;' <( echo 'USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805')

cut -c 1-2 <( echo 'USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805')

python -c "print(r'USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805'[0:2])"

ruby -e 'puts "USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805"[0..1]'

Answer 2

If you're in bash, you can say:

bash-3.2$ var=abcd
bash-3.2$ echo ${var:0:2}
ab

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