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:

import unicode

let s = "Hänsel  ««: 10,00€"
echo "Original: ", s
echo "With first character removed: ", s.runeSubStr(1)
echo "With last character removed: ", s.runeSubStr(0, s.runeLen - 1)
echo "With first and last characters removed: ", s.runeSubStr(1, s.runeLen - 2)
# Using the runes type and slices
let r = s.toRunes
echo "With first and last characters removed (other way): ", r[1 .. ^2]