Regex: How to remove extra spaces between strings in Perl

Question

I am working on a program that take user input for two file names. Unfortunately, the program can easily break if the user does not follow the specified format of the input.

Answer 1

The standard way to deal with this kind of problem is utilising command-line options, not gathering input from STDIN. Getopt::Long comes with Perl and is servicable:

use strict; use warnings FATAL => 'all';
use Getopt::Long qw(GetOptions);
my %opt;
GetOptions(\%opt, 'qseq=s', 'barcode=s') or die;
die <<"USAGE" unless exists $opt{qseq} and $opt{qseq} =~ /^sample\d[.]qseq$/ and exists $opt{barcode} and $opt{barcode} =~ /^barcode.*\.txt$/;
Usage: $0 --qseq sample1.qseq --barcode barcode.txt
       $0 -q sample1.qseq -b barcode.txt
USAGE
printf "q==<%s> b==<%s>\n", $opt{qseq}, $opt{barcode};

The shell will deal with any extraneous whitespace, try it and see. You need to do the validation of the file names, I made up something with regex in the example. Employ Pod::Usage for a fancier way to output helpful documentation to your users who are likely to get the invocation wrong.

There are dozens of more advanced Getopt modules on CPAN.