I'm working on a program (duh). I have a scalar holding a bunch of text and need to remove all the new lines from it as well as any extra spaces (ie " ") so I can format it however I want.
I promptly wrote this line $text =~ s/\n\s*/ /g; and it failed greatly because it removed a bunch of things besides newlines and space characters. So I decided screw the spaces and just kill the newlines and wrote this line $text =~ s/\n/ /g;, sadly it also fails.

So I turn to you guys. My request is for either a line that will strip out all the spaces and newlines, replacing them with one space or a multiline matching expression that will find things of the nature:

<thing>
 condition
   condition
    randomness
      other junk
</thing>

[download]
and replace it with a string of my choosing.

Why am I asking such an easy question? I think it has something to do with me not entirely understanding how to use s/// and m/// entirely. So a tutorial on how they differ would be most helpful (sadly perldoc is not exactly helpful enough for me)

thanks for the help


jcpunk
all code is tested, and doesn't work so there :p (varient on common PM sig for my own ammusment)

In reply to multi line matching problem by jcpunk

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