Question

if I have a string, say:

my $string = "A, B,C, D , E ";

How can I put this into an array in Perl without the leading and trailing spaces? So what I want is only a single letter in each array element. What I currently do is this:

my @groups = split /,\s*/, $string;

But this is obviously not enough, as the trailing spaces are still there. Any help appreciated. Thanks a lot !!

Answer 1

Then strip leading/trailing spaces before you split and match the leading/trailing spaces in the split expression.

my $string = " A, B,C, D , E ";
$string =~ s/^\s+//;
$string =~ s/\s+$//;
my @groups = split /\s*,\s*/, $string;

Using a module like Text::CSV is probably better than trying to do your own CSV parsing, though.