Why make your life more difficult than it needs to be? I prefer the straightforward approach: First deal with comments by making them whitespace, then deal with extraneous whitespace:

while (<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  s/#.*$/ /;  # first replace any comments with space

  # skip this line if it consists only of whitespace (or nothing)
  next if /^\s*$/;

  # at this point we KNOW there is at least some non-blank on the line
  # which is also non-comment.
  # Just grab everything sans leading/trailing whitespace
  my ($non_blank) = /^\s*(.+)\s*$/;
  push @enabled_lines, $non_blank if $non_blank;  # 'if' may not be ne
+cessary
}

[download]

Of course this does not account for escaped comment characters, since I thought it would obscure the simplicity (I leave it as an exercise for the reader).

dmm

You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day ...
Or, you can teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime

In reply to Re: parsing comments in newline-delimited files as lists by dmmiller2k
in thread parsing comments in newline-delimited files as lists by Amoe

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