You are matching only whitespace in parens (\s eq. whitespace). What you want is 
$input = "(here is words or numbers or dates) information starts here 
+etc...";

if($input =~ s/^\(([^\)]+)\)\s*// )
{
  print "deleted:$1\n";
  print "rest:$input\n"
}
#output: 
# deleted:here is words or numbers or dates
# rest:information starts here etc...

[download]


holli, /regexed monk/

In reply to Re: Stripping parenthesized test from beginning of a textarea string with regex by holli
in thread Stripping parenthesized test from beginning of a textarea string with regex by Anonymous Monk

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