I think it adds legibility to make it a different step

I totally agree, in the general case. In this specific case, however, the first substitution — explicitly stripping off trailing whitespace — is in fact not needed at all, because the second substitution does that anyway:

18:14 >perl -wE "my $s = '2. Kim Washington      '; $s =~ s/^\d+\.\s+(
+\w+\s+\w).*$/$1. /; say qq['$s'];"
'Kim W. '

18:14 >

[download]

Note also that in a substitution, only the left-hand part is a regex; the right-hand part is just an (interpolated) string, so the . doesn’t need to be escaped.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re^3: combining lists along with a regex by Athanasius
in thread combining lists along with a regex by Aldebaran

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