Couple o' questions

[kahaj]

How do I go about removing leading and trailing spaces from a text field when passed to a script?

Also, how do I verify that an email address is in the correct format on a form?

[masijade]

s/^\s*\(.+)\s*$/$1/

[KevinADC]

more efficient suggestion:

my $string = '  Mary had a little lamb.  ';
$string =~ s/^\s+//; #remove leading spaces
$string =~ s/\s+$//; #remove trailing spaces
print $string;

use the Email::Valid module to check email addresses

http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/Email-Valid-0.176/lib/Email/Valid.pm

[masijade]

Oh, I just noticed too, that I accidentally inserted a \ in front of the first paren.

Although, to tell you the truth, I don't know if yours is truely measurably more effecient (unless the string is very long). I feel it's simply more a personal preference (once again, depending on the length of the string, due to the amount of backtracking).

[KevinADC]

Maybe try a Benchmark test

[KevinADC]

In this case they are for all practical purposes equal:

use Benchmark qw/timethese cmpthese/;
my $string = "    Mary had a little lamb.   ";

my  $results = timethese(200000, 
        {
            'First' => sub {$string =~ s/^\s*//;$string =~ s/\s*$//;},
            'Second' => sub {$string =~ s/^\s*(.+)\s*$/$1/;}
        },
    );
cmpthese( $results ) ;

output:

Benchmark: timing 200000 iterations of First, Second...
     First:  3 wallclock secs ( 2.36 usr +  0.00 sys =  2.36 CPU) @ 84745.76/s (n=200000)
    Second:  2 wallclock secs ( 2.58 usr +  0.00 sys =  2.58 CPU) @ 77519.38/s (n=200000)
          Rate Second  First
Second 77519/s     --    -9%
First  84746/s     9%     --

I would still recommend the two regexp solution as a force of good habit though.

[kahaj]

Thanks for your help, guys. Got it figured out now.

[masijade]

I would still recommend the two regexp solution as a force of good habit though.

You're probably right, but I, myself, will sometimes settle for brevity (as in this case), since most of the perl scripts I have to write have no real need of this type of optimization. They are usually neither runtime sensitive (to a point, of course), nor do they usually have to deal with large blocks of text. ;-)