Re^3: How do I quickly strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string?

[ikegami]

Also, you made the point that none of my input ends with spaces. I think that's generally true in real life usage too.

Then shouldn't you be benchmarking space detection?

[blahblahblah]

Good point. I've tried the 3 methods below:

if ($x =~ /\s/)

and

if (substr($x, -1) =~ /^\s/

and

if (rindex($x," ") == 0 || rindex($x,"\r") == 0 ||  rindex($x,"\n") ==
+ 0 ||  rindex($x,"\t") == 0)

The rindex method is much faster on the data that has spaces; otherwise the substr method is the fastest. Any other good ideas, keeping in mind that the data (I think) won't often contain any trailing spaces?

[ikegami]

$x =~ /\s/
doesn't work. It should be
$x =~ /\s\z/
Bonus: The speed of fixed version won't depend on the length of the string like the broken one did.

if (rindex($x," ") == 0 || rindex($x,"\r") == 0 || rindex($x,"\n") == 0 || rindex($x,"\t") == 0)
doesn't work. It should be
if (rindex($x," ") == length($x)-1 || rindex($x,"\n") == length($x)-1 || rindex($x,"\t") == length($x)-1 || rindex($x,"\r") == length($x)-1)
Or just
my $ch = substr($x, -1); $ch eq " " || $ch eq "\n" || $ch eq "\t" || $ch eq "\r"

And then there's
length($x) && index(" \n\t\r", substr($x, -1)) >= 0

You should be concentrating on writing code that actually works before worrying about operations that take 0.00001 second.