As has been mentioned, chomp only removes $/ from the end of things. See also perldoc -q "blank space"

Found in /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/pods/perlfaq4.pod
       How do I strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string?

       Although the simplest approach would seem to be

           $string =~ s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/;

       not only is this unnecessarily slow and destructive, it also fa
+ils with
       embedded newlines.  It is much faster to do this operation in t
+wo
       steps:

           $string =~ s/^\s+//;
           $string =~ s/\s+$//;

       Or more nicely written as:

           for ($string) {
               s/^\s+//;
               s/\s+$//;
           }

       This idiom takes advantage of the "foreach" loop's aliasing beh
+avior to
       factor out common code.  You can do this on several strings at 
+once, or
       arrays, or even the values of a hash if you use a slice:

           # trim whitespace in the scalar, the array,
           # and all the values in the hash
           foreach ($scalar, @array, @hash{keys %hash}) {
               s/^\s+//;
               s/\s+$//;
           }
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