Hope you guys/gals can help me out with this one.

I am building an address string from disparate elements, i.e. 

my $address = $strnum . $strname . $strtype . " " . $strdir;

[download]

I then use a regex to remove duplicate whitespace leaving only a single space between the values, i.e. "123 Main St NE".

$address =~ s/  +/ /g;

But I need the $address string to be the same length among all the records, 37 bytes. Tacking on blank space to the end is an acceptable solution for my purposes, but I am unsure how to go about it as the number of spaces needed will vary from address to address. Is there a regex that will force a length while removing duplicate white space from within the string?

Thank in advance for any assistance you can provide. I feel like this should be a simple thing to do, but as Perl novice I am lost.

In reply to Remove whitespace in string and maintain overall length by silentbob343

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.