Question

I am using Perl Regular expressions.
How would i go about ignoring white space and still perform a test to see if a string match.
For example.

$var = "         hello     ";     #I want var to igonore whitespace and still match
if($var =~ m/hello/)
{



} 

Answer 1

what you have there should match just fine. the regex will match any occurance of the pattern hello, so as long as it sees “hello” somewhere in $var it will match

On the other hand, if you want to be strict about what you ignore, you should anchor your string from start to end

if($var =~ m/^\s*hello\s*$/) {
}

and if you have multiple words in your pattern

if($var =~ m/^\s*hello\s+world\s*$/) {
}

\s* matches 0 or more whitespace, \s+ matches 1 or more white space. ^ matches the beginning of a line, and $ matches the end of a line.