Question

Ok I am trying to remove a very stubborn space from the beginning of my string using regex.
This string is being parsed from a CSV file into Perl using the Text:CSV module and when I print a Dumper of the string I get:

$VAR1 = ' Mgmt-General-Other';  

now I have tried to use Regex to remove this space, someone will tell me to use:

$string =~ s/\s+$//;

I have already tried this as well as:

$string =~ s/\s//g;

and

$string =~ s/^\s//g;

and none of these worked, the middle one pulled every space out of everything except for the one I wanted. I’m trying to loop through a 2,000 line CSV file so I’d rather make this automated and not have to make a special case for this one weird instance.

Is there any way that this character at the beginning is not a space or a white space? Or how can I take it out?

Adding more things that I have tried;

$string =~ s/^\s+//;

here is my code:

my @value = @columns[1..12];
my $string = @value[9];
$string =~ s/^\s+//;
$string =~ s/\s+$//;
print Dumper $string;

if it matters these are my declarations at the top of the script:

use strict;
use DBI;
use Getopt::Long;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Utility;
use Data::Dumper;
use Text::CSV;

Answer 1

You were pretty close actually, as the correct regex for replacing whitespace at the beginning of the string would be:

$sting =~ s/^\s+//;

As for other solutions:

$sting =~ s/\s+$//; # the same as 'rtrim', removes whitespace at the end of the string
$sting =~ s/\s//g;  # will just remove all whitespace
$sting =~ s/^\s//g; # will remove single whitespace symbol right at the beginning of the string.

UPDATE: turned out you had a \xA0 (so-called ‘non-breakable whitespace’, which is NOT included in \s) in your string. ) Try this:

$sting =~ s/^[\s\xA0]+//;