Chomping It Up Pac-Man Style - Perl

If you want to chop off the end part of a string, you can do so using either the chop or chomp function. The chop function removes the last character of a string and returns what it chopped off, like so:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$scary="Look out it's Lorena Bobbitt";

$a=chop($scary);

print $scary;

print "\nOh God...I chopped off a $a! Now she's gonna be pissed!";

This will print out:

  Look out it's Lorena Bobbit

  Oh God...I chopped off a t! Now she's gonna be pissed!

In the above example we assigned a value to the variable $scary, then used the chop function to chop off the last character and assign that removed character to the variable $a. We then printed $scary and a sentence with the chopped off character in it.

Chomp works in a similar fashion, and is said to be safer than using chop, as chomp removes two line-ending characters. Consider this code, which is the same as the above code, only I have added a newline escape character to it, to insert a space between text:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$scary="Look out it's Lorena Bobbitt\n";

$a=chop($scary);

print $scary;

print "\nOh God...I chopped off a $a! Now she's gonna be pissed!";

This prints out:

  Look out it's Lorena Bobbitt

  Oh God...I chopped off a

  ! Now she's gonna be pissed!

As you can see, in this instance chop took our newline character instead of the t as we had intended. And instead of returning a t as I had wanted, it returned a newline, messing up the flow of my text. This is why it is safer to use chomp. Here it is in action:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$scary="Look out it's Lorraina Bobbittn";

$a=chomp($scary);

print $scary;

print "\nOh God...I chopped off a $a! Now she's gonna be pissed!";

Tada! Note that if you have Perl version 4, chomp doesn't work.