Re: substring function

If you want clean output text, with proper newlines for your OS at the end of each line, instead of that weird dangling ^M (which tells me that perhaps the file isn't native to that OS, and/or was not properly transferred via ASCII when it was FTP'd?), a simple regular expression (or perhaps even something simpler like chomp or chop) might do the job for you:

s/\s*$/\n/s;        # assuming \s will catch your newline
s/\s*[\r\n]+$/\n/;  # otherwise, this should do it
[download]

Or, if you just want to use substr:

substr($_, -2, 2) = undef;   # deletes last 2 characters
substr($_, -3, 3) = "\n";    # if your string ends in a newline
[download]

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RE: Re: substring function by Anish (Novice) on Sep 29, 2000 at 22:36 UTC
I do want to preserve that ^M character and also the new line character. Please give any suggestion how to use substring func.to do just that.	[reply]
RE: RE: Re: substring function by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Sep 30, 2000 at 01:16 UTC
If you literally want to clear the 2nd character from the end (i.e. byte 49 of 50 bytes), you could do this with substr: `substr($string, -2, 1) = undef;` [download] That should neatly cut that character out of the string. My instincts tell me you're doing something "the hard way", though. I really cannot see the value of having a binary ^M sitting out near the end of ASCII text file lines. I would only expect to see that with improperly transferred files between systems that use incompatible newlines. I don't quite understand what you're trying to accomplish, but my gut tells me you're going about this problem (whatever your true problem is) the wrong way. Good luck.	[reply] [d/l]