This just makes things unnecessarily more complicated, scain. The original version is absolutely equivalent to yours and shorter to write - thus easier to understand. $string =~ s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/;

Some further explanation: The starting \s* eats up all whitespaces (because its greedy). Then (.*?) starts capturing and the first character must be \S (or the end of the string for something matching /^\s*$/). Due to its non-greediness the (.*?) advances slowly one character at a time, always trying to match afterwards the rest of the pattern (\s*$) and backtracks if not successful. So all trailing whitespaces are for sure eaten up by the greedy \s* at the end of the pattern leaving a \S as the last character in the capturing brackets.

The solution with two replaces given by many other monks is preferable as it

• is quicker
• doesn't get caught on embedded newlines (as . matches by default everything but a newline) - if you only want to remove space at the beginning and end of the string
• is easily adaptable to remove all leading and trailing whitespaces on a slurped file:

  $file =~ s/^\s+//mg;
  $file =~ s/\s+$//mg;
  [download]

-- Hofmator

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.