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

Oh wise Monks,

We have been putting off porting this code for way too long. I have Perl 5.6.1 code that I am trying to run under Perl 5.10.1 and I get this message ... 

$* is no longer supported

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... when executing this bit of code: 
        for ($ro_string) {
                s/^\s*//;
                s/$*\s//;
        }

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Does any monk know what $* should be replaced with in this old code?

Thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: $* is no longer supported
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 03, 2009 at 21:39 UTC
    Your code has never worked. It was likely suppose to be 
    for ($ro_string) {
    s/^\s*//;
    s/\s*$//;
}

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[d/l]

      Have I got my rules for scoping wrong, or is that code useless? 

      my $ro_string = "    I'm surrounded by spaces!    ";
for ($ro_string) { # alias $_ to $ro_string for this scope
    s/^\s*//; # strip leading spaces from $_
    s/\s*$//; # strip trailing spaces from $_
} # lose $_ when the scope ends
print; # nothing!

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      At least, that's what I'm getting on Perl 5.8.9.

      UPDATE: True but irrelevant, as pointed out by Your Mother and ikegami.

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[d/l]
        You should be printing $ro_string. Due to the aliasing done by for, modifying $_ in the loop also modifies $ro_string.
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[d/l]
[select]

      print; # nothing!

      print $ro_string; # something! :)

      (update: Derrrrrr, meant to respond to JadeNB of course.)

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[d/l]
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        Derrrrrr, meant to respond to JadeNB of course.
        Well, it's no problem; I responded to ikegami. :-)
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Re: $* is no longer supported
by BioLion (Curate) on Nov 03, 2009 at 21:38 UTC
[reply]
[d/l]

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