Greetings all,

I'm doing a fair amount of work on editing strings inside a human-readable statement file, and have found using substr has its limits.
Take this: 

my $f = "   ";
substr($f, 5, 5, "12345");

[download]
Which will, quickly, complain of 'substr outside string'. Admittedly, I understand _why_ perl is doing it - but I'd rather perl just stuck in a few leading " "s and not complain at me about it.
Any thoughts on a way to do this _without_ initialising all the strings to 80 chars w/padded spaces - and then for the sake of filesize, removing all trailing spaces after text and before the newline marker?

Cheers,
JP

-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

In reply to substr and strings on the outside by JPaul

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.