I was going to post this to the Snippets section but it probably belongs here. 
    # Strip leading and trailing whitespace from a string
    $str = unpack "A*", (split ' ', $str, 1)[0];

[download]

Note: this is about 50% slower than the method recommended in perlfaq4.

--
John.

In reply to Strip leading and trailing whitespace from a string. by jmcnamara

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