It would be good to see some oof your data, to try to figure out what you're doing and why.

Just a couple of comments on some code details, although it might be that it would be better to change it overall.

Why would you need this: 

   $s =~ s/^[ \t]+//mg;    # remove leading  whitespace from each line
   $s =~ s/^\s+//;         # remove leading  whitespace

[download]
when the second line will do everything that the firstline is doing? (Same from trailing spaces).

Similarly, I don't see the reason to run the same pair of statements three times: 

$s =~ s/^;.*\Z//m; chomp $s;
$s =~ s/^;.*\Z//m; chomp $s;
$s =~ s/^;.*\Z//m; chomp $s;

[download]
Once should be enough, no? And I doubt the chomp is useful here.

In reply to Re: Removing multiple trailing comment lines from a string by Laurent_R
in thread Removing multiple trailing comment lines from a string by eyepopslikeamosquito

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