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

And here is one more way you could do it with regex (if you are reading the input from STDIN):

# read a line from STDIN
my $filenames = ;

# parse the line with a regex or die with an error message
my ($qseq_filename, $barcode) = $filenames =~ /^\s*(\S.*?)\s*,\s*(\S.*?)\s*$/
    or die "invalid input '$filenames'";