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Postings from March 2021
On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 12:51 AM Darren Duncan <darren@darrenduncan.net> wrote: > Would it be scope creep to consider making the proposed built-in trim() > more > general or customizable? > > There is already precedent in other languages including SQL where trim() > can > take an optional extra argument that defines the character set we want to > trim, > and if omitted it defaults to plain whitespace. > > That is, I propose trim() has an optional second argument that is a > regular > expression fragment defining a single character class, or perhaps a full > on > regular expression value. > > For example, these 2 have the same behavior: > > trim($str); > trim($str, /\s*/); > > But then one could also alternately say something like this: > > trim($str, /\W*/); > trim($str, /[abc]/); > trim($str, / /); > > The idea is that users can decide for themselves what bounding characters > are > considered garbage to get rid of. > > I realize that keeping it simple is key because after awhile we can just > say > well use a regular s/// then to get what you want. > > The idea with my proposal is that the second argument is something simple > where > behavior is to strip off anything matching at the very start and very end > of the > string. > > And actually trim() should be behaving with \a and \Z or such anchors and > not ^ > or $ anchors as traditionally understood that treat multi-line strings > special. > > Note that my proposal is a syntax extension so it could be ignored in the > first > version and added later while being backwards compatible with the simpler > 1-argument version this discussion is mainly about. But maybe its worth > doing > in the first version. > This was previously discussed, I summed up the options in this comment: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/17952#issuecomment-658462652 -DanThread Previous | Thread Next