chop will remove the last character from a string, but I wonder if that's really what you want to do.

To remove all of the whitespace from the end of a string, use something like this:

$string =~ s/\s+$//;
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"The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."

chomp($date); # remove newlines
chop($date);  # remove last char

$date =~ s/\s*$//; # remove trailing spaces

$date = substr($date,0,(length($date)-1)); # remove last char

($date) = $date =~ m/(.*)\s*$/; # i would imagine the slowest solution
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you suggested :

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$date = substr($date,0,(length($date)-1)); # remove last char
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It's worth noting that perl uses negative numbers to "count backwards" when dealing with string (and array, and probably many other surprising things) indexes, removing the need to do things like length($date)-1)). Code looks nicer and scans better for the effort.
See Piercer's code below.

Update : Wouldn't it be nice if push, pop and (un)shift worked on characters in a string? Yes, there's chop. that's true enough, but still.

In regard to your update, you should check out Tie::CharArray

:-)

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

@l=split(//,$date);pop(@l);foreach(@l){$r.=$_}print$r;

What fun :)

--
my @words = grep({ref} @clever);
sub version { print "I cuss your capitalist pig tendencies bad!\n" }