Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!axion!tharr!gustav
From: gustav@tharr.UUCP (Paul Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Multi-line strings and $*
Message-ID: <1391@tharr.UUCP>
Date: 5 Nov 90 23:19:35 GMT
Reply-To: gustav@tharr.UUCP (Paul Moore)
Organization: Public access to Usenet in the UK
Lines: 26

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding how to use $* to handle
multiline strings.

I have a string, $article, which contains a large number of lines of
text (OK, so it's a news article...) The article may end with any number
of blank lines (ie, \n\n\n), which I want to remove.

My first thought is $article =~ s/\n+$//, with $* = 0. But the manual says
"Pattern matches on strings containing multiple newlines can produce
confusing results when $* is 0". Um.

However, if $* = 1, there seems to be no way of anchoring a pattern to
the end (or the beginning) of a string.

At this point, I started getting frustrated...

Any clues, anybody?

Thanks in advance,
Gustav.
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