m/\s*<result>/

Or if you only want one single blank, 

m/ ?<result>

[download]

See perlretut for an introduction to regular expressions.

Update: as SuicideJunkie++ pointed out, the leading \s* or  ? are pretty pointless unless you either anchor the regex or look at the match variables after the match.

In reply to Re: matching white spaces in perl by moritz
in thread matching white spaces in perl by anand_perl

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