Neatest way to remove linebreaks in Perl

Question

I'm maintaining a script that can get its input from various sources, and works on it per line. Depending on the actual source used, linebreaks might be Unix-style, Windows-style or even, for some aggregated input, mixed(!). When reading from a file it goes something like this: ``` @lines = <IN>; process(\@lines); ... sub process { @lines = shift; foreach my $line (@{$lines}) { chomp $line; #Handle line by line } } ``` So, what I need to do is replace the chomp with something that removes either Unix-style or Windows-style linebreaks. I'm coming up with way too many ways of solving this, one of the usual drawbacks of Perl :) What's your opinion on the neatest way to chomp off generic linebreaks? What would be the most efficient? Edit: A small clarification - the method 'process' gets a list of lines from somewhere, not nessecarily read from a file. Each line might have - No trailing linebreaks - Unix-style linebreaks - Windows-style linebreaks - Just Carriage-Return (when original dat…

Accepted Answer

After digging a bit through the perlre docs a bit, I'll present my best suggestion so far that seems to work pretty good. Perl 5.10 added the \R character class as a generalized linebreak:

```
$line =~ s/\R//g;
```

It's the same as:

```
(?>\x0D\x0A?|[\x0A-\x0C\x85\x{2028}\x{2029}])
```

I'll keep this question open a while yet, just to see if there's more nifty ways waiting to be suggested.

Neatest way to remove linebreaks in Perl

Solution

Problem