Well,

I'm writing a general purpose script to handle form submissions, and am wondering about cleaning up textareas. My current function to clean up the text is this:

sub clean_data
{
    my @fields = map
    {
        s/\r+/ /g;
        s/\n+/ /g;
        s/\s+/ /g;
        s/\|/-/g;
        s/^\s//;
        s/\s$//;
        $_;
    } @_;
}

This seems to do everything I want, but since I don't really know what I'm doing, there is likely a better way.

I also am looking through the O'Reilly "CGI Programming with Perl" which uses a similar sub to replace returns with \r, tabs with \t, etc. so that the original formatting of the text is 'preserved' essentially. I would like to do this as well (preserve the formatting, as much as possible), but I need to be able to write it out to a pipe delimited file that folks can import into various programs.

I haven't looked at any modules yet, as I wanted to try to figure it out on my own first, but if anyone can recommend a module that would do the work, thats cool.

I would appreciate any pointers.

cheers.

In reply to Tidying up textarea fields by antjock

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