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Perl Gripes

WATCHING: Big Fish It took me awhile to warm to this movie, but I ended up enjoying it. Not a great movie, not one I'll watch again for some time, but with a sweet, funny and thoughtful story line. And great imagination. Actually, this is a movie that works better as a preview - it's got some great, three-second-long shots that would translate well to previews/commercials and so on. All movies

There's a lot of iffy areas that Perl catches flack for - loosely typed variables, overuse of hashes, the utter incomprehensibility of some excellent code (such as a great regex to extract data - looks like a punctuation-fest).

However, my biggest gripe - and maybe I'm missing something - is the lack of a built in trim() function.

Why not??

While I understand that you can use a regex like I have above, a trim function is something, to me, that should be part of every language.

Especially in these days of XML and Web-based apps, the spaces can matter.

So you want to trim stuff before it goes into the database.

Ditto when it comes out.

But that's me.


There is an int() function in Perl - that returns a string as an integer. You could write a simple regex for this, as well, but there is the more useful - and expected - int function (parseInt() in JavaScript, I believe - in database languages you often have to CAST the string).

So why not a freakin' trim function?!?

I still like Perl in spite of it.