Mmmhh, you are removing all the spaces from the string, this was not the original question. It was about removing whitespace (which includes \t, \r, \n, \f and your space) from the start and end of a string.

btw, you are using a character class in your regex where it is not necessary, so just write: s/ +//g; and for this task a regex is overkill, use a transliteration (tr) instead: tr/ //d;

-- Hofmator