How to handle symbols in LISP

Probobly the simpletst way to get a symbol name in LISP is to call a function symbol-name .
  USER(1): (symbol-name '_np)
  "_NP"
  
Note that the result is always uppercase.

Then you can use the usual sequence handling functions, such as subseq or find, to manipulate strings.

  USER(3): (subseq "abcd" 2 4)
  "cd"
  

Once you have the string that corresponds to a symbol name, you can use the function read-from-string to convert it to a symbol.

  USER(5): (read-from-string "aBc")
  ABC
  3