Dan Anderson wrote: > > Is there a way to chomp all whitespace both at the beginning and end of > a string?
That is what is known as a Frequently Asked Question or FAQ. Perl provides copious amounts of documentation including a large list of FAQs in the perlfaq.pod file. Perl also provides a program which can be used to search the FAQs called "perldoc". perldoc perldoc perldoc perl perldoc perlfaq perldoc -q "strip blank space" > I was thinking of using a regexp like s[^\s*?][]sg and > s[\s*?$][]sg; Is there a better way? You are on the right track. Using the substitution operator twice for the beginning and end of the string is the usual way to do it, however you have used the /s and /g options. The /s option affects the behaviour of . in a regex. Since you are not using . in the regex this option has no effect. The /g option means that you want the pattern to match globally, in other words, match as many times as the pattern exists in the string, however both regexes are anchored at the beginning and end respectively so they can only match once so the /g option has no effect. And finally, you are using the * modifier on the \s character class which means that the substitution is performed on every string, whether there is whitespace or not. In other words, using the string 'text', the zero whitespace at the beginning the string will be replaced with nothing. You should use the + modifier so that only strings that actually have whitespace will be modified. John -- use Perl; program fulfillment -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
