Top and tail

Strip any characters:

say "knight".substr(1)        # strip first character
say "socks".substr(0, -1)     # strip last character
say "brooms".substr(1, -1)    # strip both first and last characters
say "与今令".substr(1, -1)     # => 今

Output:

night
sock
room
今

Strip graphemes:

var gstr = "J\x{332}o\x{332}s\x{332}e\x{301}\x{332}"
say gstr-/^\X/                     # strip first grapheme
say gstr-/\X\z/                    # strip last grapheme
say gstr.sub(/^\X/).sub(/\X\z/)    # strip both first and last graphemes

Output:

o̲s̲é̲
J̲o̲s̲
o̲s̲