That's probably not doing what you want, at least according the your original problem specification which called for removing spaces between, rather than after, characters. Consider:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = "The quick & the dead.";

$str =~ s/(\W)\s+/$1/g;
print $str;

[download]

Prints:

The quick &the dead.

[download]
True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re^3: string substitution by GrandFather
in thread string substitution by Gosh

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