Hi PerlMonks, at best, I am a novice to Perl, who is seeking to remove large chunks of whitespace (i.e., anything other than a character) between lines of a text file. This site contains a thread dating back to 2000, which seems to address this issue. Some Monks suggest the use of substitution pattern matching, while others suggest WHILE loops. I am attempting to use a while loop in the code below (but remain completely open to other ideas). However, I have no need for user input(i.e., do not need <STDIN>), and am less than clueless for how to use "print if (!/^\s*$/)" to remove the whitespace and write/save the result to the file. Apologize for such a simple problem. Grateful for any ideas. Thank you! 

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use lib "c:/strawberry/perl/site/lib";

my $files_dir = 'F:\research\SEC filings 10K and 10Q\Data\Filing Docs\
+2009\Test Data\HTML Clean';
my $write_dir = 'F:\research\SEC filings 10K and 10Q\Data\Filing Docs\
+2009\Test Data\HTML Clean\Non Word Strip';

opendir (my $dir_handle, $files_dir);
while (my $filename = readdir($dir_handle))   {  
  next unless -f $files_dir.'/'.$filename;

  print "Procesing $filename\n";

  open my $fh_in, '<', $files_dir.'/'.$filename
      or die "failed to open '$filename' for read";
  
  open my $fh_out, '>', $write_dir.'/'.$filename
      or die "failed to open '$filename' for write";
  
  my $count=0;   

  while (my $line = <$fh_in>)   {       
    my $text = $line;
    chomp ($text);  
    
    #Strip/remove whitespace between lines of text file;
    while (<STDIN>)
    {
      print if (!/^\s*$/);
    }
                     
    print $fh_out "$text\n";  #Save stripped results; 
         
  } 

    ++$count; 

    print "$count lines read from $filename\n;"  

}

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In reply to Remove whitespace between lines by wrkrbeee

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