Is there a Perl-compatible regular expression to trim whitespace from both sides of a string?

Question

Is there a way to do this in one line?

$x =~ s/^\\s+//;
$x =~ s/\\s+$//;

In other words, remove all leading and trailing whitespace from a stri

Answer 1

I usually do it like this:

($foo) = $foo =~ /^\s*(.*?)\s*$/;

Everything between the leading spaces and the trailing spaces is grouped and returned, so I can assign it to the same old variable.