Hi LinuxMatt,

I'd suggest using qr to stringify each regex:

my @all_patterns = (
    qr/#.*/,
    qr/^\s+/,
    qr/\s+$/,
    qr/^Total/,
    qr/^,/,
    # ... and so on ...
);
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Which avoids the overhead of calling an extra subroutine for each line of every file.

Then the apply_patterns subroutine would something like this:

 
sub apply_patterns {
    my ($string, @indexes) = @_;
    # Note $string is only a placeholder

    foreach my $idx (@indexes) {
        my $regex = $all_patterns[$idx];
        s/$regex//;
    }
}
[download]

Update:   Modified apply_patterns to work with $_[0] directly.