Re: help! reading in special characters from file

If you just want to remove the extra spaces then use the \s+ construct:

$lines[0] =~ s/\s+/ /g;
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The regex says substitute 1 or more spaces with a single space. (Note: you have $line[0] which I assume is a typo). Check out perlre for more info.

-derby

Comment on Re: help! reading in special characters from file Download Code

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Re^2: help! reading in special characters from file by graff (Chancellor) on Jun 02, 2007 at 16:35 UTC
That will turn tabs into spaces (maybe not a bad thing, depending on the situation), and will turn the newline at the end into a space (usually a bad thing, depending on the situation). So one should decide exactly what is needed, depending on the situation: `# pick one of: s/ +/ /g; # just reduce strings of consecutive spaces s/[ \xA0]+/ /g; # reduce and normalize space/nbsp strings s/[ \xA0\t]+/ /g; # include tabs as well s/\s+/ /g; # all kinds of whitespace, including newlines` [download]	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^2: help! reading in special characters from file
by graff (Chancellor) on Jun 02, 2007 at 16:35 UTC

So one should decide exactly what is needed, depending on the situation:

# pick one of:
s/ +/ /g;  # just reduce strings of consecutive spaces
s/[ \xA0]+/ /g;  # reduce and normalize space/nbsp strings
s/[ \xA0\t]+/ /g;  # include tabs as well
s/\s+/ /g;   # all kinds of whitespace, including newlines
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