whitespace-squashing in scalars

[DoraC]

hi,

A variable I parse input into in one of my programs can (and will) in certain situations be fed pure whitespace. Non-whitespace situations aren't a problem, but if it happens to receive a space, I don't want to lose it. Here's an example:

    $var = " ";
    $var2 = length $var;
    print "length is: $var2\n";

and the output is: length is: 0

Is there any way to prevent this from happening? My guess is that this whitespace-squashing is an immutable aspect of Perl, but I'm not sure. There are, of course, ways i can get around this but the cleanest/neatest would be to (in this context) have the whitespace not get squashed.

Thanks!
dora

 

[Coderifous]

You must have a typo in your code, becuase spaces do count as characters, and thus, are considered by the length() function.

Could you copy and paste your affected code? Becuase the above actually doesn't produce the output you specified.

--jim