getting characters

[Hans van der Meer <hansm@science.uva.nl>]

While fiddling with character strings I found the \getfirstcharacter  
macro which is very handy.
However, I am consuming a character string character by character.
Although I have a macro for that, I think it is a good policy to stay  
as much as possible within the ConTexT framework when concocting  
macro's to be used under ConTeXt.

Now for the question.
  \getfirstcharacter puts the first character in \firstcharacter.
I looked for a macro containing the rest of the string but could not  
find one.
Something like:
	\getfirstcharacter{abc}
then
	\firstcharacter = a
	\lastcharacters = bc

This will make it possible to process a string character by  
character, in the same way as \processcommalist does with comma  
separated strings.
But possibly this is already somewhere in the code and I overlooked it.

yours sincerely,
dr. H. van der Meer