Thanks for enlightening me! ;-)
I prefer your second example. The only problem with that example is that you've forgotten one single slash character at the end of tr:
$line += tr/ \t\r\n/c;
which must be:
$line += tr/ \t\r\n//c;
After fixing that, the sript works cool ;-)
I also realized that I can handle the situation using the command line:
$ tr [:space:] -d <ccount.pl | wc
0 1 69
Now I think that tr (in Perl or in shell) is a better way to get rid of unwanted characters, am I wrong?
P.S.: If Thelonious S. Monk programmed (in any language) woe to the ones who could maintain his code ;-)