Question

I have a string as below.

$line = 'this is my string "hello world"';

I want to have a regex to delete all space characters inside the string except the region “Hello world”.

I use below to delete space chars but it deletes all of them.

$line=~s/ +//g;

How can I exclude the region between “Hello world” and i get the string as below?

thisismystring"hello world"

Thanks

Answer 1

Since you probably want to handle quoted strings properly, you should have a look at the Text::Balanced module.

Use that to split your text into quoted parts and non-quoted parts, then do the replacement on the non-quoted parts only, and finally join the string together again.