`first(X;Y)`

Returns a string consisting of the first number of characters of a given string.

Syntax

first(X;Y)

Input

Argument	Type	Description
`X`	text	The string on which to apply the function A scalar value or the name of a column
`Y`	integer	The number of characters to extract from `X`

Return Value

Returns a text string comprised of the first Y characters of X.

If X is N/A, the result is Y blank characters.

Sample Usage


`value`	`number`	`first(value;number)`
'banana'	3	'ban'
'banana'	4	'bana'
'banana'	2	'ba'

Example

In the "Product Master" table (pub.demo.retail.prod), you can extract the substrings consisting of the first three characters of the department descriptions. To do this, create a computed column and apply the first(X;Y) function to the deptdesc column.

<base table="pub.demo.retail.prod"/>
<willbe name="example" value="first(deptdesc;3)"/>
<colord cols="deptdesc,example"/>

The results are the first three characters of the values in the deptdesc column.

Additional Information

This function does not work with Unicode (UTF-8) strings.
For a Unicode-compliant alternative, consider strextract(X;P;N).