Hi John W. Krahn, you wrote: Thanks for taking the time for this detailed explanation!
>If I understand you correctly then this will do what you want: > >$str =~ tr/ //s; > >Or if you want a slower method: > >$str =~ s/ +/ /g; This might sound a strange question, but why is the first one faster? >Or if you want to do it the hard way: > >$str = join ' ', split ' ', $str; This just confuses me! >By the way, the /i option is for a case insensitive match. *snip* Aye, I saw that as soon as I hit the post button! However, your additional comments were useful anyway. I think I'm confusing myself though with matches and expressions. I thought that I could remove lines from the data by matching whether the first character was a letter by using the 'if' statement as : if(substr($line,0,1) eq [a-zA-Z]) ...but this doesn't work. Neither does : if($line eq [\s\d]) ...to try and find if it's just contain numbers and spaces. Obviously I'm missing the point on the syntax but just can't see what and the perldocs read like stereo instructions! :) -- Dale -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
