I threw together the following scriptlet to clean up some text files, but now I'd like to add 2 minor refinements.
  1. list the wah, blah, yada, and blankline regex's separately, like a config section.   There's not necessarily 3, it varies from file to file.
  2. read infile and outfile names from STDIN

No doubt this is elementary to the many "real programmers" among the PM bretheren.   The PM Tutorials suggest that a hash may do #1, but I'm at a loss on quite how to implement.

Thanks in advance for any direction or code examples.
    cheers,
    ybiC 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $infile  = "/dir/infilename";
my $outfile = "/dir/outfilename";

open (IN,  "$infile")     or die "Error opening $infile: $!\n";
open (OUT, ">$outfile")   or die "Error opening $outfile: $!\n";

while (<IN>) {
    s/wahwah//g;          # unwanted text
    s/blahblah//g;        # more unwanted text
    s/yadayada//g;        # still more unwanted text
    s/^\s+//g;            # blank lines
    print OUT $_          or die "Error writing to $outfile: $!\n";
    }

close (IN)                or die "Error closing $infile: $!\n"; 
close (OUT)               or die "Error closing $outfile: $!\n";

# END

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In reply to elementary hash, STDIN questions by ybiC

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