I have a file with some data which i want to crunch into an AOH.Thed data corresp. to a record needs to be put into a hash.The data is of the form

Record#1:
name:'George Simpson'
age:25
occupation:'PLumber' ... so on

I use the following code to seperate the 'name'(to be the key of hash) & 'George Simpson'(to be the corresp value)

while(defined($index = <$inp_file>))
    {
        if (($index =~ m"Record#") && ((keys %$hash_ref) != 0))
        {
            return ($hash_ref);
        }
        next if ($index =~ m"Record#");
        $index =~ m"(.*?): (.*)";

        my $key = $1;
        my $val = $2;

    #1    $key =~ s"^\s+""g;
    #2    $key =~ s"\s+$""g;
    #3    $val =~ s"^\s+""g;
    #4    $val =~ s"\s+$""g;

        $hash_ref->{$key} = $val;
    }

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Problem is that the four #ed lines above that i use to clean empty spaces is generating a warning which says :

Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///)at f2ds4.pl at line 30 , <GENO> line 13

I am a bit lost here .. though the script runs and gives results, Id like to know which uninitialized value it is talking about ! thank you -pacman

edit by thelenm: added code tags

In reply to cleaning up spaces on either side of an extracted string by pacman

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