Re: new to perl

[Colin Meyer <cmeyer@helvella.org>]

Osiris,

On Sun, Jul 30, 2000 at 02:08:13PM -0500, oguzman@stkate.edu wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm new to perl scripting and would like to know if someone has a quick command
> to trim a space in an input like "A " to convert to " A".  I tried tr/ //d, but
> it does not work, substitution
> is not working either.  THank you,

The answer to your question can be found in the perlfaq4 manpage:

       How do I strip blank space from the beginning/end of a
       string?

       Although the simplest approach would seem to be:

           $string =~ s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/;

       Not only is this unnecessarily slow and destructive, it
       also fails with embedded newlines.  It is much faster to
       do this operation in two steps:

           $string =~ s/^\s+//;
           $string =~ s/\s+$//;

       Or more nicely written as:

           for ($string) {
               s/^\s+//;
               s/\s+$//;
           }

If you are new to perl, I suggest reading all of the perlfaqs.
Try 'perldoc perlfaq' to see a contents listing.

-Colin.