How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string?

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

I have a variable, batch_date, which is the

SYSDATE
[download]

selected with the format

MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS
[download]

. How can I take the string

$batch_date
[download]

and remove all of the blank spaces, then put this into a new variable?

Comment on How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string? Select or Download Code

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Re: How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string? by wog (Curate) on Jun 08, 2001 at 01:38 UTC
`($a_new_variable = $batch_date) =~ tr[ \n\t][]d;` This should be slightly faster then `s///`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string? by marcink (Monk) on Jun 08, 2001 at 01:36 UTC
Use a regexp: `$batch_date =~ s/\s//g;` Or, if you want to keep the old value in input variable: `($new_var = $batch_date) =~ s/\s//g;` -mk	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string? by tomhukins (Curate) on Jun 08, 2001 at 01:36 UTC
From your question, I'm not clear what you're trying to achieve. Could you give more detail? If you just want to remove spaces from a variable, try `$batch_date =~ s/\s//g;`.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string? by harmony (Initiate) on Jun 08, 2001 at 02:13 UTC
Thank you everybody for the help you've given on this. But now I need to perform additional work on this string. After removing the spaces, I need to also remove the slashes `(/)` [download] . I know how to remove the colons `(:)` [download] . It's tricky, with `s/ / /g` [download] since `/` [download] are the separators.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Re: How do I remove all of the blank spaces in a string? by marcink (Monk) on Jun 08, 2001 at 02:46 UTC
As usual, there's a wide choice of ways to do this ;-) A couple of ways of converting slashes to letters 'q': Method one: backslash `s/\//q/g` Method two: cool s/// syntax `s\|/\|q\|g` `s(/)(q)g` `s{/}{q}g` You don't have to use slashes in s/// -- take a look at 'man perlop'. Update: Are you sure you don't want to take a look at Date::Manip and Date::Format? There's a nice parseDate function in the former ;-) And one more s/// that probably does exactly what you want, in one pass: `s{(\d\d)/(\d\d)/(\d\d\d\d)\s+(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)}{$1$2$3$4$5$6}` -mk	[reply] [d/l] [select]