Re^4: trim leading & trailing whitespace

How about this:

$_ = "   yes  \n   \n   \n    they    \n \n    will     \n\n\n";
s/^\s*?(?:\b(.*?)\s*?)?(\n)?$/$1$2/gm;
print;
__END__
% perl 443391.pl
yes


they

will
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the lowliest monk

Comment on Re^4: trim leading & trailing whitespace Download Code

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Re^5: trim leading & trailing whitespace by bart (Canon) on Mar 30, 2005 at 11:10 UTC
Danger, don't use `\b` if you want to detect the edges between spaces an nonspaces. It won't work for nonspace+nonword characters, like quotes and punctuation. Perhaps replace the `\b(.?)` with `(\S.?)`. Still, you're not running this with warnings enabled, are you? Both $1 and $2 are optional, so both can be undef, but you use their value regardless. This runs without warnings: `s/^\s?((?:\S.?)?)\s*?(\n?)$/$1$2/gm;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^5: trim leading & trailing whitespace
by bart (Canon) on Mar 30, 2005 at 11:10 UTC

\b

Perhaps replace the \b(.*?) with (\S.*?).

Still, you're not running this with warnings enabled, are you? Both $1 and $2 are optional, so both can be undef, but you use their value regardless. This runs without warnings:

s/^\s*?((?:\S.*?)?)\s*?(\n?)$/$1$2/gm;
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[reply]
[d/l]