Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area

Zcity has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi I have a cgi that prints a html form and would like to remove spaces, commas, semicolons in the textarea field. What do you recommend?

2006-07-05 Retitled by planetscape, as per Monastery guidelines

( keep:0 edit:5 reap:0 )

Original title: 'cgi form'

Comment on Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area

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Re: Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area by davorg (Chancellor) on Jul 05, 2006 at 12:43 UTC
Probably I'd recommend some kind of regular expression substitution on the contents of the text area. I can be less vague if you can. -- <http://dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply]
Re: Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area by Ieronim (Friar) on Jul 05, 2006 at 14:19 UTC
Use the tr/// operator, e.g. `$textarea =~ tr/ ,;//d;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area by Zcity (Novice) on Jul 05, 2006 at 19:28 UTC
the tr/// works when i'm doing the print html but when im posting the text in the log file, it doesnt delete the line spaces. Any other solutions?	[reply]
Re^3: Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area by eric256 (Parson) on Jul 05, 2006 at 21:28 UTC
That tr doesn't include new lines at all. The only reason you see it working in the HTML is because HTML always ignores newlines. ___________ Eric Hodges	[reply]
Re: Tidying up punctuation in a CGI text area by derby (Abbot) on Jul 05, 2006 at 12:51 UTC
If a regex doesn't work for you, I'd recommend not focusing too much on the output. I find that by not focusing, my vision becomes a bit blurry and then I tend not notice stuff like extra spaces or punctuation (thank you Evelyn Wood!). -derby	[reply]