Well, to be exact, chomp removes whatever string happens to match the current value of "$/" (input record separator), which defaults to "\015\012" for windows text-mode, "\n" for unix. (update: see replies below for correct info)

And it only does this when the string matching $/ happens to occur at the end of the scalar value being chomped. 

perl -e '$/ = "\n"; $_ = "str\015\012"; chomp; s/(\s)/sprintf("%o",ord
+($1))/eg; print $_,$/'

# prints "str15"

perl -e '$/ = "\r\n"; $_ = "str\015\012"; chomp; s/(\s)/sprintf("%o",o
+rd($1))/eg; print $_,$/'

# prints "str"

perl -e '$/="\r\n"; $_ = "foo\015\012str\015\012"; chomp; s/(\s)/sprin
+tf("%o",ord($1))/eg; print $_,$/'

# prints "foo1512str"

[download]
Update: Honest, I really did (start to) post this before tachyon made it redundant. And I confess I was not speaking from personal experience (lucky me) about the default value of $/ on ms-win -- thanks to tachyon for the correction.

In reply to Re^3: Strange character beginning text files by graff
in thread Strange character beginning text files by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.