You're right, in my haste to get this question out there I made the jump from my original problem to japhy's post to talking about his benchmarks. One of my coworkers pointed out the same thing to me as I was headed out the door. Obviously I should be benchmarking the exact problem I want to solve, not some generally similar example. After I get the kids to bed I'll write a better benchmark and try your \K suggestion below too. Thanks.

Also, you made the point that none of my input ends with spaces. I think that's generally true in real life usage too. It's frustrating that we have this pervasive idiom in our code of "strip whitespace just in case", but I think most of the time the input is already just fine. In fact, I think much of the time the input is short and has no spaces at all. I wonder if I should be checking it with index() first to quickly rule out that case.

update: added paragraph spacing

In reply to Re^2: How do I quickly strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string? by blahblahblah
in thread How do I quickly strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string? by blahblahblah

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.