Perl is a free-form language, so you can actually write them on one line (although I don't see any sense in it): 
$string = "hello"; $string =~ /^\s+|\s$/g;

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Also since "hello" is a literal that contains neither leading nor trailing whitespaces, you can actually just write that as 

$string = "hello";

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If you have the string in a variable, you can write: 
($string = $source) =~ s/^\s+|\s$/g;

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In reply to Re: need to consolidate two lines to one by moritz
in thread need to consolidate two lines to one by chuckd

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