Ug, ignore the parent post. I missed the removal of blank lines and the removal of leading spaces. Here's the straightforward way, when reading from a file: 
while (<$fh>) {
   chomp;
   s/^\s+//;
   next if !length;
   s/\s+$//;
   s/\s+/ /g;
   ...
}

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In reply to Re^2: removing redundantwhitespace by ikegami
in thread removing redundantwhitespace by Anonymous Monk

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