perhaps - untested -:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw (uniq);
# I think this is the fastest way for the trim functionality...
# 2 statements benchmark faster than one statement
sub myTrim {
my $str = shift; #shift faster than @_ for one paramater
$str =~ s/^\s*//; #no space at front
$str =~ s/\s*$//; #no space at rear
return $str;
}
my @fileTags = map{myTrim($_)}@fileTags.
@fileTags = uniq @fileTags;
Update: I did run this:
Your Trim function does not trim the trailing spaces because the match (.*) is greedy...
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw (uniq);
sub myTrim {
my ($str) = @_;
my ($trimmed) = ($str =~ /\s*(.*)\s*/);
return $trimmed;
}
my $x = "x ";
$x = myTrim($x);
print "$x!\n"; #prints "x !"
Update: The single statement version of your MyTrim() would be
str =~ s/^\s*|\s*$//g; I saw one benchmark where that appeared to be faster than the "standard" 2 statements, but I was never able to re-create that result myself. Perl regex performance can vary significantly between releases - in general things get faster - but hiccups do happen.