Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call in chomp

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

Wondering whether anyone else has already experienced this problem. This piece of code worked fine with 5.8.2 (I just retested, and is fine):

my $credentials = chomp(encode_base64("peip:930612"));
[download]

But it does not work with 5.8.4, and complains: "Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call in chomp"...

Comment on Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call in chomp Download Code

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Re: Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call in chomp by davido (Cardinal) on Jul 19, 2004 at 21:13 UTC
Is it your intention to assign the length of whatever gets chomped (usually '\n') to $credentials? chomp's return value is the length of whatever got chomped, not the input-string minus the chomped bit. chomp acts upon its parameter list, and in your case, is trying to modify the non-lvalue sub. Update: chomp returns length of chomped portion, not the chomped portion itself. Dave	[reply]
Re: Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call in chomp by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Jul 19, 2004 at 21:17 UTC
What you want is to `chomp` the scalar, not the return value: `chomp(my $credentials = encode_base64("peip:930612"));` As usual, this is untested, etc.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Can't modify non-lvalue subroutine call in chomp by ccn (Vicar) on Jul 19, 2004 at 21:17 UTC
I wonder how it can work. `chomp` returns number of deleted characters. Do you really want to `$credentials` have this numeric value?	[reply] [d/l] [select]