Re: trim leading & trailing whitespace

Personally, I don't see any need to improve on the old standard:

s/^\s+//;
s/\s+$//;
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update: After seeing thinker's reply I realized I might have misunderstood the question. If, like he suggests, you mean to remove leading and trailing whitespace from each line of a multi-line string, then I'd change the second line above to:

s/\s*\n\s*/\n/g;
[download]

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Re^2: trim leading & trailing whitespace by ihb (Deacon) on Mar 30, 2005 at 10:09 UTC
`\s` matches newlines too, meaning that your pattern will remove empty lines, not just trim them. An alternative is `s/^[^\S\n]+//gm; s/[^\S\n]+$//gm;` [download] `ihb` See perltoc if you don't know which perldoc to read!	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: trim leading & trailing whitespace by ady (Deacon) on Mar 30, 2005 at 08:01 UTC
Probably as good as it gets... Much better than my 1.cut at the job. Tanks a heap! Allan	[reply]