Getting rid of first space?

jimmybeaches has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hola!!! Just back from Mexico and I like saying Hola instead of hello... it's quicker :)

So, I am new to Perl... bought a book and I think I am off the right start with chomp or chop, except I am trying to remove a blank space from the front of a line.

I am simply trying to open the contents of a text file into an array and print them, except every line AFTER the first line prints with a blank space in front of it?! Is there some way of stripping the blank space away from every line in the array?

Contents of the text file:

one.

two.
three.
four.
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the code in my script:

my $messagebody = "message.txt";
open(messagebody, $messagebody) || Error ('open', 'file');
flock (messagebody, 2) || Error ('lock', 'file');

my @messagebody = <messagebody>;

print @messagebody;

sub Error {
  print "The server can't $_[0] the $_[1]: $! \n";
  exit;
}
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The file prints like this:

one.

 two.
 three.
 four.
[download]

Is there a way to reverse what chop? (if that makes any sense...)

Comment on Getting rid of first space? Select or Download Code

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Re: Getting rid of first space?
by tall_man (Parson) on Mar 16, 2003 at 04:13 UTC

print @messagebody

foreach (@messagebody) {
  print;
}
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Update:

$,

perlvar

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Re: Getting rid of first space?
by pfaut (Priest) on Mar 16, 2003 at 04:15 UTC

Is that your exact program? The only way I can see you getting those results would be if you interpolated the array into a string as in print "@messagebody".

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
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Re: Getting rid of first space?
by thpfft (Chaplain) on Mar 16, 2003 at 04:21 UTC

It sounds like something in your script is setting $, to a space, for some reason. Perhaps you're trying to print something out nicely somewhere else? Well, don't :)

Anyway, it's the print statement that's inserting the spaces, i think. The reason they show up the way they do is because each item in your array still has a newline on the end, and the space is added after that.

you have two immediate options: you can take more control over the formatting of the list with something like this:

print join('', @messagebody);
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or you could save yourself lots of trouble, sort out the thing with $, and get rid of the newline character at the first opportunity:

chomp( my @messagebody = <DATA> );
print join("\n", @messagebody);
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The explanation of why chomping that whole statement happens to chomp the items in the array is worth coming back to later. Meanwhile, to answer the question you actually asked, there are (at least) dozens of ways of removing the first character of each item in a list. This is the first that comes to mind:

s/^\s+// for @messagebody;
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which will remove all leading spaces and tabs, and might do unkind things to, for example, messages containing python code...