=head1 NAME perlfaq4 - Data Manipulation ($Revision: 10394 $) =head1 DESCRIPTION This section of the FAQ answers questions related to manipulating numbers, dates, strings, arrays, hashes, and miscellaneous data issues. =head1 Data: Numbers =head2 Why am I getting long decimals (eg, 19.9499999999999) instead of the numbers I should be getting (eg, 19.95)? Internally, your computer represents floating-point numbers in binary. Digital (as in powers of two) computers cannot store all numbers exactly. Some real numbers lose precision in the process. This is a problem with how computers store numbers and affects all computer languages, not just Perl. L shows the gory details of number representations and conversions. To limit the number of decimal places in your numbers, you can use the printf or sprintf function. See the L<"Floating Point Arithmetic"|perlop> for more details. printf "%.2f", 10/3; my $number = sprintf "%.2f", 10/3; =head2 Why is int() broken? Your C is most probably working just fine. It's the numbers that aren't quite what you think. First, see the answer to "Why am I getting long decimals (eg, 19.9499999999999) instead of the numbers I should be getting (eg, 19.95)?". For example, this print int(0.6/0.2-2), "\n"; will in most computers print 0, not 1, because even such simple numbers as 0.6 and 0.2 cannot be presented exactly by floating-point numbers. What you think in the above as 'three' is really more like 2.9999999999999995559. =head2 Why isn't my octal data interpreted correctly? Perl only understands octal and hex numbers as such when they occur as literals in your program. Octal literals in perl must start with a leading C<0> and hexadecimal literals must start with a leading C<0x>. If they are read in from somewhere and assigned, no automatic conversion takes place. You must explicitly use C or C if you want the values converted to decimal. C interprets hexadecimal (C<0x350>), octal (C<0350> or even without the leading C<0>, like C<377>) and binary (C<0b1010>) numbers, while C only converts hexadecimal ones, with or without a leading C<0x>, such as C<0x255>, C<3A>, C, or C. The inverse mapping from decimal to octal can be done with either the <%o> or C<%O> C formats. This problem shows up most often when people try using C, C, C, or C, which by widespread tradition typically take permissions in octal. chmod(644, $file); # WRONG chmod(0644, $file); # right Note the mistake in the first line was specifying the decimal literal C<644>, rather than the intended octal literal C<0644>. The problem can be seen with: printf("%#o",644); # prints 01204 Surely you had not intended C - did you? If you want to use numeric literals as arguments to chmod() et al. then please try to express them as octal constants, that is with a leading zero and with the following digits restricted to the set C<0..7>. =head2 Does Perl have a round() function? What about ceil() and floor()? Trig functions? Remember that C merely truncates toward 0. For rounding to a certain number of digits, C or C is usually the easiest route. printf("%.3f", 3.1415926535); # prints 3.142 The C module (part of the standard Perl distribution) implements C, C, and a number of other mathematical and trigonometric functions. use POSIX; $ceil = ceil(3.5); # 4 $floor = floor(3.5); # 3 In 5.000 to 5.003 perls, trigonometry was done in the C module. With 5.004, the C module (part of the standard Perl distribution) implements the trigonometric functions. Internally it uses the C module and some functions can break out from the real axis into the complex plane, for example the inverse sine of 2. Rounding in financial applications can have serious implications, and the rounding method used should be specified precisely. In these cases, it probably pays not to trust whichever system rounding is being used by Perl, but to instead implement the rounding function you need yourself. To see why, notice how you'll still have an issue on half-way-point alternation: for ($i = 0; $i < 1.01; $i += 0.05) { printf "%.1f ",$i} 0.0 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.7 0.8 0.8 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0 Don't blame Perl. It's the same as in C. IEEE says we have to do this. Perl numbers whose absolute values are integers under 2**31 (on 32 bit machines) will work pretty much like mathematical integers. Other numbers are not guaranteed. =head2 How do I convert between numeric representations/bases/radixes? As always with Perl there is more than one way to do it. Below are a few examples of approaches to making common conversions between number representations. This is intended to be representational rather than exhaustive. Some of the examples later in L use the C module from CPAN. The reason you might choose C over the perl built in functions is that it works with numbers of ANY size, that it is optimized for speed on some operations, and for at least some programmers the notation might be familiar. =over 4 =item How do I convert hexadecimal into decimal Using perl's built in conversion of C<0x> notation: $dec = 0xDEADBEEF; Using the C function: $dec = hex("DEADBEEF"); Using C: $dec = unpack("N", pack("H8", substr("0" x 8 . "DEADBEEF", -8))); Using the CPAN module C: use Bit::Vector; $vec = Bit::Vector->new_Hex(32, "DEADBEEF"); $dec = $vec->to_Dec(); =item How do I convert from decimal to hexadecimal Using C: $hex = sprintf("%X", 3735928559); # upper case A-F $hex = sprintf("%x", 3735928559); # lower case a-f Using C: $hex = unpack("H*", pack("N", 3735928559)); Using C: use Bit::Vector; $vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(32, -559038737); $hex = $vec->to_Hex(); And C supports odd bit counts: use Bit::Vector; $vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(33, 3735928559); $vec->Resize(32); # suppress leading 0 if unwanted $hex = $vec->to_Hex(); =item How do I convert from octal to decimal Using Perl's built in conversion of numbers with leading zeros: $dec = 033653337357; # note the leading 0! Using the C function: $dec = oct("33653337357"); Using C: use Bit::Vector; $vec = Bit::Vector->new(32); $vec->Chunk_List_Store(3, split(//, reverse "33653337357")); $dec = $vec->to_Dec(); =item How do I convert from decimal to octal Using C: $oct = sprintf("%o", 3735928559); Using C: use Bit::Vector; $vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(32, -559038737); $oct = reverse join('', $vec->Chunk_List_Read(3)); =item How do I convert from binary to decimal Perl 5.6 lets you write binary numbers directly with the C<0b> notation: $number = 0b10110110; Using C: my $input = "10110110"; $decimal = oct( "0b$input" ); Using C and C: $decimal = ord(pack('B8', '10110110')); Using C and C for larger strings: $int = unpack("N", pack("B32", substr("0" x 32 . "11110101011011011111011101111", -32))); $dec = sprintf("%d", $int); # substr() is used to left pad a 32 character string with zeros. Using C: $vec = Bit::Vector->new_Bin(32, "11011110101011011011111011101111"); $dec = $vec->to_Dec(); =item How do I convert from decimal to binary Using C (perl 5.6+): $bin = sprintf("%b", 3735928559); Using C: $bin = unpack("B*", pack("N", 3735928559)); Using C: use Bit::Vector; $vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(32, -559038737); $bin = $vec->to_Bin(); The remaining transformations (e.g. hex -> oct, bin -> hex, etc.) are left as an exercise to the inclined reader. =back =head2 Why doesn't & work the way I want it to? The behavior of binary arithmetic operators depends on whether they're used on numbers or strings. The operators treat a string as a series of bits and work with that (the string C<"3"> is the bit pattern C<00110011>). The operators work with the binary form of a number (the number C<3> is treated as the bit pattern C<00000011>). So, saying C<11 & 3> performs the "and" operation on numbers (yielding C<3>). Saying C<"11" & "3"> performs the "and" operation on strings (yielding C<"1">). Most problems with C<&> and C<|> arise because the programmer thinks they have a number but really it's a string. The rest arise because the programmer says: if ("\020\020" & "\101\101") { # ... } but a string consisting of two null bytes (the result of C<"\020\020" & "\101\101">) is not a false value in Perl. You need: if ( ("\020\020" & "\101\101") !~ /[^\000]/) { # ... } =head2 How do I multiply matrices? Use the Math::Matrix or Math::MatrixReal modules (available from CPAN) or the PDL extension (also available from CPAN). =head2 How do I perform an operation on a series of integers? To call a function on each element in an array, and collect the results, use: @results = map { my_func($_) } @array; For example: @triple = map { 3 * $_ } @single; To call a function on each element of an array, but ignore the results: foreach $iterator (@array) { some_func($iterator); } To call a function on each integer in a (small) range, you B use: @results = map { some_func($_) } (5 .. 25); but you should be aware that the C<..> operator creates an array of all integers in the range. This can take a lot of memory for large ranges. Instead use: @results = (); for ($i=5; $i < 500_005; $i++) { push(@results, some_func($i)); } This situation has been fixed in Perl5.005. Use of C<..> in a C loop will iterate over the range, without creating the entire range. for my $i (5 .. 500_005) { push(@results, some_func($i)); } will not create a list of 500,000 integers. =head2 How can I output Roman numerals? Get the http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Roman module. =head2 Why aren't my random numbers random? If you're using a version of Perl before 5.004, you must call C once at the start of your program to seed the random number generator. BEGIN { srand() if $] < 5.004 } 5.004 and later automatically call C at the beginning. Don't call C more than once--you make your numbers less random, rather than more. Computers are good at being predictable and bad at being random (despite appearances caused by bugs in your programs :-). see the F article in the "Far More Than You Ever Wanted To Know" collection in http://www.cpan.org/misc/olddoc/FMTEYEWTK.tgz , courtesy of Tom Phoenix, talks more about this. John von Neumann said, "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." If you want numbers that are more random than C with C provides, you should also check out the C module from CPAN. It uses the imperfections in your system's timer to generate random numbers, but this takes quite a while. If you want a better pseudorandom generator than comes with your operating system, look at "Numerical Recipes in C" at http://www.nr.com/ . =head2 How do I get a random number between X and Y? To get a random number between two values, you can use the C builtin to get a random number between 0 and 1. From there, you shift that into the range that you want. C returns a number such that C<< 0 <= rand($x) < $x >>. Thus what you want to have perl figure out is a random number in the range from 0 to the difference between your I and I. That is, to get a number between 10 and 15, inclusive, you want a random number between 0 and 5 that you can then add to 10. my $number = 10 + int rand( 15-10+1 ); Hence you derive the following simple function to abstract that. It selects a random integer between the two given integers (inclusive), For example: C. sub random_int_between { my($min, $max) = @_; # Assumes that the two arguments are integers themselves! return $min if $min == $max; ($min, $max) = ($max, $min) if $min > $max; return $min + int rand(1 + $max - $min); } =head1 Data: Dates =head2 How do I find the day or week of the year? The localtime function returns the day of the year. Without an argument localtime uses the current time. $day_of_year = (localtime)[7]; The C module can also format a date as the day of the year or week of the year. use POSIX qw/strftime/; my $day_of_year = strftime "%j", localtime; my $week_of_year = strftime "%W", localtime; To get the day of year for any date, use C's C to get a time in epoch seconds for the argument to localtime. use POSIX qw/mktime strftime/; my $week_of_year = strftime "%W", localtime( mktime( 0, 0, 0, 18, 11, 87 ) ); The C module provides two functions to calculate these. use Date::Calc; my $day_of_year = Day_of_Year( 1987, 12, 18 ); my $week_of_year = Week_of_Year( 1987, 12, 18 ); =head2 How do I find the current century or millennium? Use the following simple functions: sub get_century { return int((((localtime(shift || time))[5] + 1999))/100); } sub get_millennium { return 1+int((((localtime(shift || time))[5] + 1899))/1000); } On some systems, the C module's C function has been extended in a non-standard way to use a C<%C> format, which they sometimes claim is the "century". It isn't, because on most such systems, this is only the first two digits of the four-digit year, and thus cannot be used to reliably determine the current century or millennium. =head2 How can I compare two dates and find the difference? (contributed by brian d foy) You could just store all your dates as a number and then subtract. Life isn't always that simple though. If you want to work with formatted dates, the C, C, or C modules can help you. =head2 How can I take a string and turn it into epoch seconds? If it's a regular enough string that it always has the same format, you can split it up and pass the parts to C in the standard C module. Otherwise, you should look into the C and C modules from CPAN. =head2 How can I find the Julian Day? (contributed by brian d foy and Dave Cross) You can use the C module available on CPAN. Ensure that you really want to find a Julian day, though, as many people have different ideas about Julian days. See http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/jdn.htm for instance. You can also try the C module, which can convert a date/time to a Julian Day. $ perl -MDateTime -le'print DateTime->today->jd' 2453401.5 Or the modified Julian Day $ perl -MDateTime -le'print DateTime->today->mjd' 53401 Or even the day of the year (which is what some people think of as a Julian day) $ perl -MDateTime -le'print DateTime->today->doy' 31 =head2 How do I find yesterday's date? (contributed by brian d foy) Use one of the Date modules. The C module makes it simple, and give you the same time of day, only the day before. use DateTime; my $yesterday = DateTime->now->subtract( days => 1 ); print "Yesterday was $yesterday\n"; You can also use the C module using its C function. use Date::Calc qw( Today_and_Now Add_Delta_DHMS ); my @date_time = Add_Delta_DHMS( Today_and_Now(), -1, 0, 0, 0 ); print "@date_time\n"; Most people try to use the time rather than the calendar to figure out dates, but that assumes that days are twenty-four hours each. For most people, there are two days a year when they aren't: the switch to and from summer time throws this off. Let the modules do the work. =head2 Does Perl have a Year 2000 problem? Is Perl Y2K compliant? Short answer: No, Perl does not have a Year 2000 problem. Yes, Perl is Y2K compliant (whatever that means). The programmers you've hired to use it, however, probably are not. Long answer: The question belies a true understanding of the issue. Perl is just as Y2K compliant as your pencil--no more, and no less. Can you use your pencil to write a non-Y2K-compliant memo? Of course you can. Is that the pencil's fault? Of course it isn't. The date and time functions supplied with Perl (gmtime and localtime) supply adequate information to determine the year well beyond 2000 (2038 is when trouble strikes for 32-bit machines). The year returned by these functions when used in a list context is the year minus 1900. For years between 1910 and 1999 this I to be a 2-digit decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't. When gmtime() and localtime() are used in scalar context they return a timestamp string that contains a fully-expanded year. For example, C<$timestamp = gmtime(1005613200)> sets $timestamp to "Tue Nov 13 01:00:00 2001". There's no year 2000 problem here. That doesn't mean that Perl can't be used to create non-Y2K compliant programs. It can. But so can your pencil. It's the fault of the user, not the language. At the risk of inflaming the NRA: "Perl doesn't break Y2K, people do." See http://www.perl.org/about/y2k.html for a longer exposition. =head1 Data: Strings =head2 How do I validate input? (contributed by brian d foy) There are many ways to ensure that values are what you expect or want to accept. Besides the specific examples that we cover in the perlfaq, you can also look at the modules with "Assert" and "Validate" in their names, along with other modules such as C. Some modules have validation for particular types of input, such as C, C, C, and C. =head2 How do I unescape a string? It depends just what you mean by "escape". URL escapes are dealt with in L. Shell escapes with the backslash (C<\>) character are removed with s/\\(.)/$1/g; This won't expand C<"\n"> or C<"\t"> or any other special escapes. =head2 How do I remove consecutive pairs of characters? (contributed by brian d foy) You can use the substitution operator to find pairs of characters (or runs of characters) and replace them with a single instance. In this substitution, we find a character in C<(.)>. The memory parentheses store the matched character in the back-reference C<\1> and we use that to require that the same thing immediately follow it. We replace that part of the string with the character in C<$1>. s/(.)\1/$1/g; We can also use the transliteration operator, C. In this example, the search list side of our C contains nothing, but the C option complements that so it contains everything. The replacement list also contains nothing, so the transliteration is almost a no-op since it won't do any replacements (or more exactly, replace the character with itself). However, the C option squashes duplicated and consecutive characters in the string so a character does not show up next to itself my $str = 'Haarlem'; # in the Netherlands $str =~ tr///cs; # Now Harlem, like in New York =head2 How do I expand function calls in a string? (contributed by brian d foy) This is documented in L, and although it's not the easiest thing to read, it does work. In each of these examples, we call the function inside the braces used to dereference a reference. If we have more than one return value, we can construct and dereference an anonymous array. In this case, we call the function in list context. print "The time values are @{ [localtime] }.\n"; If we want to call the function in scalar context, we have to do a bit more work. We can really have any code we like inside the braces, so we simply have to end with the scalar reference, although how you do that is up to you, and you can use code inside the braces. Note that the use of parens creates a list context, so we need C to force the scalar context on the function: print "The time is ${\(scalar localtime)}.\n" print "The time is ${ my $x = localtime; \$x }.\n"; If your function already returns a reference, you don't need to create the reference yourself. sub timestamp { my $t = localtime; \$t } print "The time is ${ timestamp() }.\n"; The C module can also do a lot of magic for you. You can specify a variable name, in this case C, to set up a tied hash that does the interpolation for you. It has several other methods to do this as well. use Interpolation E => 'eval'; print "The time values are $E{localtime()}.\n"; In most cases, it is probably easier to simply use string concatenation, which also forces scalar context. print "The time is " . localtime() . ".\n"; =head2 How do I find matching/nesting anything? This isn't something that can be done in one regular expression, no matter how complicated. To find something between two single characters, a pattern like C will get the intervening bits in $1. For multiple ones, then something more like C would be needed. But none of these deals with nested patterns. For balanced expressions using C<(>, C<{>, C<[> or C<< < >> as delimiters, use the CPAN module Regexp::Common, or see L. For other cases, you'll have to write a parser. If you are serious about writing a parser, there are a number of modules or oddities that will make your life a lot easier. There are the CPAN modules C, C, and C; and the C program. Starting from perl 5.8 the C is part of the standard distribution. One simple destructive, inside-out approach that you might try is to pull out the smallest nesting parts one at a time: while (s/BEGIN((?:(?!BEGIN)(?!END).)*)END//gs) { # do something with $1 } A more complicated and sneaky approach is to make Perl's regular expression engine do it for you. This is courtesy Dean Inada, and rather has the nature of an Obfuscated Perl Contest entry, but it really does work: # $_ contains the string to parse # BEGIN and END are the opening and closing markers for the # nested text. @( = ('(',''); @) = (')',''); ($re=$_)=~s/((BEGIN)|(END)|.)/$)[!$3]\Q$1\E$([!$2]/gs; @$ = (eval{/$re/},$@!~/unmatched/i); print join("\n",@$[0..$#$]) if( $$[-1] ); =head2 How do I reverse a string? Use C in scalar context, as documented in L. $reversed = reverse $string; =head2 How do I expand tabs in a string? You can do it yourself: 1 while $string =~ s/\t+/' ' x (length($&) * 8 - length($`) % 8)/e; Or you can just use the C module (part of the standard Perl distribution). use Text::Tabs; @expanded_lines = expand(@lines_with_tabs); =head2 How do I reformat a paragraph? Use C (part of the standard Perl distribution): use Text::Wrap; print wrap("\t", ' ', @paragraphs); The paragraphs you give to C should not contain embedded newlines. C doesn't justify the lines (flush-right). Or use the CPAN module C. Formatting files can be easily done by making a shell alias, like so: alias fmt="perl -i -MText::Autoformat -n0777 \ -e 'print autoformat $_, {all=>1}' $*" See the documentation for C to appreciate its many capabilities. =head2 How can I access or change N characters of a string? You can access the first characters of a string with substr(). To get the first character, for example, start at position 0 and grab the string of length 1. $string = "Just another Perl Hacker"; $first_char = substr( $string, 0, 1 ); # 'J' To change part of a string, you can use the optional fourth argument which is the replacement string. substr( $string, 13, 4, "Perl 5.8.0" ); You can also use substr() as an lvalue. substr( $string, 13, 4 ) = "Perl 5.8.0"; =head2 How do I change the Nth occurrence of something? You have to keep track of N yourself. For example, let's say you want to change the fifth occurrence of C<"whoever"> or C<"whomever"> into C<"whosoever"> or C<"whomsoever">, case insensitively. These all assume that $_ contains the string to be altered. $count = 0; s{((whom?)ever)}{ ++$count == 5 # is it the 5th? ? "${2}soever" # yes, swap : $1 # renege and leave it there }ige; In the more general case, you can use the C modifier in a C loop, keeping count of matches. $WANT = 3; $count = 0; $_ = "One fish two fish red fish blue fish"; while (/(\w+)\s+fish\b/gi) { if (++$count == $WANT) { print "The third fish is a $1 one.\n"; } } That prints out: C<"The third fish is a red one."> You can also use a repetition count and repeated pattern like this: /(?:\w+\s+fish\s+){2}(\w+)\s+fish/i; =head2 How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a string? There are a number of ways, with varying efficiency. If you want a count of a certain single character (X) within a string, you can use the C function like so: $string = "ThisXlineXhasXsomeXx'sXinXit"; $count = ($string =~ tr/X//); print "There are $count X characters in the string"; This is fine if you are just looking for a single character. However, if you are trying to count multiple character substrings within a larger string, C won't work. What you can do is wrap a while() loop around a global pattern match. For example, let's count negative integers: $string = "-9 55 48 -2 23 -76 4 14 -44"; while ($string =~ /-\d+/g) { $count++ } print "There are $count negative numbers in the string"; Another version uses a global match in list context, then assigns the result to a scalar, producing a count of the number of matches. $count = () = $string =~ /-\d+/g; =head2 How do I capitalize all the words on one line? To make the first letter of each word upper case: $line =~ s/\b(\w)/\U$1/g; This has the strange effect of turning "C" into "C". Sometimes you might want this. Other times you might need a more thorough solution (Suggested by brian d foy): $string =~ s/ ( (^\w) #at the beginning of the line | # or (\s\w) #preceded by whitespace ) /\U$1/xg; $string =~ s/([\w']+)/\u\L$1/g; To make the whole line upper case: $line = uc($line); To force each word to be lower case, with the first letter upper case: $line =~ s/(\w+)/\u\L$1/g; You can (and probably should) enable locale awareness of those characters by placing a C pragma in your program. See L for endless details on locales. This is sometimes referred to as putting something into "title case", but that's not quite accurate. Consider the proper capitalization of the movie I, for example. Damian Conway's L module provides some smart case transformations: use Text::Autoformat; my $x = "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop ". "Worrying and Love the Bomb"; print $x, "\n"; for my $style (qw( sentence title highlight )) { print autoformat($x, { case => $style }), "\n"; } =head2 How can I split a [character] delimited string except when inside [character]? Several modules can handle this sort of parsing--C, C, C, and C, among others. Take the example case of trying to split a string that is comma-separated into its different fields. You can't use C because you shouldn't split if the comma is inside quotes. For example, take a data line like this: SAR001,"","Cimetrix, Inc","Bob Smith","CAM",N,8,1,0,7,"Error, Core Dumped" Due to the restriction of the quotes, this is a fairly complex problem. Thankfully, we have Jeffrey Friedl, author of I, to handle these for us. He suggests (assuming your string is contained in C<$text>): @new = (); push(@new, $+) while $text =~ m{ "([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*)",? # groups the phrase inside the quotes | ([^,]+),? | , }gx; push(@new, undef) if substr($text,-1,1) eq ','; If you want to represent quotation marks inside a quotation-mark-delimited field, escape them with backslashes (eg, C<"like \"this\"">. Alternatively, the C module (part of the standard Perl distribution) lets you say: use Text::ParseWords; @new = quotewords(",", 0, $text); =head2 How do I strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string? (contributed by brian d foy) A substitution can do this for you. For a single line, you want to replace all the leading or trailing whitespace with nothing. You can do that with a pair of substitutions. s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; You can also write that as a single substitution, although it turns out the combined statement is slower than the separate ones. That might not matter to you, though. s/^\s+|\s+$//g; In this regular expression, the alternation matches either at the beginning or the end of the string since the anchors have a lower precedence than the alternation. With the C flag, the substitution makes all possible matches, so it gets both. Remember, the trailing newline matches the C<\s+>, and the C<$> anchor can match to the physical end of the string, so the newline disappears too. Just add the newline to the output, which has the added benefit of preserving "blank" (consisting entirely of whitespace) lines which the C<^\s+> would remove all by itself. while( <> ) { s/^\s+|\s+$//g; print "$_\n"; } For a multi-line string, you can apply the regular expression to each logical line in the string by adding the C flag (for "multi-line"). With the C flag, the C<$> matches I an embedded newline, so it doesn't remove it. It still removes the newline at the end of the string. $string =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//gm; Remember that lines consisting entirely of whitespace will disappear, since the first part of the alternation can match the entire string and replace it with nothing. If need to keep embedded blank lines, you have to do a little more work. Instead of matching any whitespace (since that includes a newline), just match the other whitespace. $string =~ s/^[\t\f ]+|[\t\f ]+$//mg; =head2 How do I pad a string with blanks or pad a number with zeroes? In the following examples, C<$pad_len> is the length to which you wish to pad the string, C<$text> or C<$num> contains the string to be padded, and C<$pad_char> contains the padding character. You can use a single character string constant instead of the C<$pad_char> variable if you know what it is in advance. And in the same way you can use an integer in place of C<$pad_len> if you know the pad length in advance. The simplest method uses the C function. It can pad on the left or right with blanks and on the left with zeroes and it will not truncate the result. The C function can only pad strings on the right with blanks and it will truncate the result to a maximum length of C<$pad_len>. # Left padding a string with blanks (no truncation): $padded = sprintf("%${pad_len}s", $text); $padded = sprintf("%*s", $pad_len, $text); # same thing # Right padding a string with blanks (no truncation): $padded = sprintf("%-${pad_len}s", $text); $padded = sprintf("%-*s", $pad_len, $text); # same thing # Left padding a number with 0 (no truncation): $padded = sprintf("%0${pad_len}d", $num); $padded = sprintf("%0*d", $pad_len, $num); # same thing # Right padding a string with blanks using pack (will truncate): $padded = pack("A$pad_len",$text); If you need to pad with a character other than blank or zero you can use one of the following methods. They all generate a pad string with the C operator and combine that with C<$text>. These methods do not truncate C<$text>. Left and right padding with any character, creating a new string: $padded = $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) ) . $text; $padded = $text . $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) ); Left and right padding with any character, modifying C<$text> directly: substr( $text, 0, 0 ) = $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) ); $text .= $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) ); =head2 How do I extract selected columns from a string? (contributed by brian d foy) If you know where the columns that contain the data, you can use C to extract a single column. my $column = substr( $line, $start_column, $length ); You can use C if the columns are separated by whitespace or some other delimiter, as long as whitespace or the delimiter cannot appear as part of the data. my $line = ' fred barney betty '; my @columns = split /\s+/, $line; # ( '', 'fred', 'barney', 'betty' ); my $line = 'fred||barney||betty'; my @columns = split /\|/, $line; # ( 'fred', '', 'barney', '', 'betty' ); If you want to work with comma-separated values, don't do this since that format is a bit more complicated. Use one of the modules that handle that fornat, such as C, C, or C. If you want to break apart an entire line of fixed columns, you can use C with the A (ASCII) format. by using a number after the format specifier, you can denote the column width. See the C and C entries in L for more details. my @fields = unpack( $line, "A8 A8 A8 A16 A4" ); Note that spaces in the format argument to C do not denote literal spaces. If you have space separated data, you may want C instead. =head2 How do I find the soundex value of a string? (contributed by brian d foy) You can use the Text::Soundex module. If you want to do fuzzy or close matching, you might also try the C, and C, and C modules. =head2 How can I expand variables in text strings? (contributed by brian d foy) If you can avoid it, don't, or if you can use a templating system, such as C or C