Problem Statement

The task is to demonstrate how to remove the first and last characters from a string. The solution should demonstrate how to obtain the following results:

If the program uses UTF-8 or UTF-16, it must work on any valid Unicode code point, whether in the Basic Multilingual Plane or above it. The program must reference logical characters (code points), not 8-bit code units for UTF-8 or 16-bit code units for UTF-16. Programs for other encodings (such as 8-bit ASCII, or EUC-JP) are not required to handle all Unicode characters.

Let's start with the solution:

> (defvar *str* "∀Ꮺ✤Л◒")
*STR*
> (subseq *str* 1) ; remove first character
"Ꮺ✤Л◒"
> (subseq *str* 0 (1- (length *str*))) ; remove last character
"∀Ꮺ✤Л"
> (subseq *str* 1 (1- (length *str*))) ; remove first and last character
"Ꮺ✤Л"