Perl: function to trim string leading and trailing whitespace

Question

Is there a built-in function to trim leading and trailing whitespace such that trim(\" hello world \") eq \"hello world\"?

Answer 1

There's no built-in trim function, but you can easily implement your own using a simple substitution:

sub trim {
    (my $s = $_[0]) =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g;
    return $s;
}

or using non-destructive substitution in Perl 5.14 and later:

sub trim {
   return $_[0] =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//rg;
}