help me ---regarding string

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

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Re: help me ---regarding string by Utilitarian (Vicar) on Oct 06, 2009 at 08:02 UTC
You could use a regex like the following. `$spacyString=~ s/\s(\S)/$1/g;` [download] This removes any space followed by a non-space character. Edited to make work properly after morning coffee	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: help me ---regarding string by perlprint (Initiate) on Oct 06, 2009 at 08:49 UTC
thanks a lot ...	[reply]
Re: help me ---regarding string by DrHyde (Prior) on Oct 06, 2009 at 09:49 UTC
Are they spaces, or are they NULs that get rendered as spaces in whatever you're using to view the data? This is a common symptom of 16-bit character sets, in which case the solution is to do some Encode voodoo that I don't understand.	[reply]
Re: help me ---regarding string by biohisham (Priest) on Oct 06, 2009 at 08:55 UTC
The idea is to look for spaces on word boundaries and remove them (i.e it monitors the transition of a word character into a non-word character and then removes the non-word character), you can also monitor the transition of a non-word character into a word character by detecting the word character boundary post a non-word character as in the second line. `$string = "H e l l o P e r l p r i n t"; print $string for $string =~ s/\b[ ]//g; print $string for $string =~ s/[ ]\b//g; UPDATE:added non-capturing square brackets to account for more efficie +ncy after Anomalous Monk's enlightenment...` [download] An exercise question for you, what do you think the reason that running both the print lines above together would result in the following output, But running only a single line of either the two print statements works just fine?! `Hello PerlprintHelloPerlprint` [download] Excellence is an Endeavor of Persistence. Chance Favors a Prepared Mind.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: help me ---regarding string by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Oct 06, 2009 at 10:20 UTC
Although perlprint asked only about blanks and letters, sometimes punctuation creeps in. The third alternative handles all non-blanks and avoids capturing: `>perl -wMstrict -le "my $string = 'W h a t H o ? N o G o .'; (my $sqz1 = $string) =~ s{ [ ] \b }{}xmsg; print qq{'$sqz1'}; (my $sqz2 = $string) =~ s{ \b [ ] }{}xmsg; print qq{'$sqz2'}; (my $sqz3 = $string) =~ s{ [ ] (?![ ]) }{}xmsg; print qq{'$sqz3'}; " 'What Ho ? No Go .' 'What Ho? No Go.' 'What Ho? No Go.'` [download] Update: `(?![ ])` vice `(?=\S)` in third example.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: help me ---regarding string by tye (Sage) on Oct 06, 2009 at 13:48 UTC
`s/ ( ?)/$1/g` [download] - tye	[reply] [d/l]
Re: help me ---regarding string by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 06, 2009 at 15:06 UTC
Are you sure your text isn't encoded using UTF-16 or similar? `use Encode qw( decode ); my $text = decode('UCS-2le', "a\0b\0c\0 \0d\0e\0f\0"); print("$text\n"); # abc def` [download]	[reply] [d/l]