Hello. I'll cut to the chase here. I posted a LONG message earlier today, and wound up not sending it, as I got passed that hurtle, and now I'm on another. "$/" was suggested to me once when I wanted to use a regex and have it go over a newline character. And, it worked. I'm sucking data from a few hundred HTML files. The code that was given to me was : 
local $/ = "<br>"

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Since in that case, there was always a newline character after \
. So, what I'm doing now, is taking a much larger string (several hundred characters) after matching a similar regular expression. After checking the old cookbook, I decided slupr mode (page 274 or so) was the best idea. My regular expression is working, except for one thing. I can't seem to get the whitespaces out. The string I grab, shows up just as it does in the original (crappy Frontpage produced) HTML file. Looks like this. 
This would be the first line.  It's fine and dandy.
         Something tends to go wrong about here though.
         And of course the next line would be here.
         The next line here.  
         And so on and so on.

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I assumed I could substitute whitespaces, but that's not happening. Here's a cut down version of the code that generates this. 
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#
use strict;
use warnings;

my $directory = "/path/to/html/files/";
my ($line, $base, $file, $description);

undef $/;
opendir ( DIR, $directory ) or die "Can't open $directory $!";
while ( my $base = readdir( DIR ) ) {
     if ( $base =~ /.htm/ ) {
          $file = $directory . $base;
          open ( FILE, $file ) or die "Can't open $file $!";
          my $whole_file = <FILE>;
          if ( $whole_file =~ /.+?Title:.*?<\/b>*(.*?)<br>*\s*<br>\s*(
+.+?)</si ) {
               $description = $2;
               $description =~ s/\s{2,}/ /s; # I tried many varaitions
+ of this to no avail
               $description =~ s/&nbsp;/ /s;
               $description =~ s/<.+?>/ /s;
               print "$description\n\n";
          }
     }
}

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So, maybe an explanation of what exactly $/ does would get me started. If I'm understanding it write, it can redefine the newline character, no? Or maybe my substitution of whitespaces is just way off. I thought my code above would substitute 2 or and infinite number of whitespaces with a big ole donut, but that didn't work. Thanks.

In reply to help substituting whitespaces? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
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