Thanks all for the ideas!

@Marshall: I'm not working on something specific, just playing around.

The one thing I like about chop is that its like pop, but for scalars.

The s/\s+$// regex which tye mentioned is pretty cool. Also, I like the ability of Perl to increment strings, as ikegami said. Bummer I didn't know that yet.

As for the padding, I think I'll stick with my old technique, e.g.: substr(("0"x9)."64",-4). I think its pretty self-explaining.

Thanks, Iwein