ww,

Just a thought, if the 'string-to-capture' had information separated by spaces, your code would eliminate all spaces, maybe the special case:

my $str = "yada yada <name> string-to-capture   string-to-capture2 </n
+ame> foo bar baz";
if ( $str =~ m!<name>(.*?)<\/name>! )
   {
      my $var1=$1;
      $var1 = join(" ", split " ", $var1 );  # remove leading, trailin
+g and 
                                             # collapse internal white
+space
      print "$var1\n";
   }
[download]

would be better. ( Taken from Camel book 3rd edition, page 154 )