Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Tue 10/13/2020 23:18:23 C:\@Work\Perl\monks >perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings my $s = '"654321_1111"'; print "'$s' \n"; $s = substr $s, 1, -1; print "'$s' \n"; ^Z '"654321_1111"' '654321_1111'