Removing blank elements from an array

Question

In my Perl code, I am accessing an email. I need to fetch the table in it and parse it into an array. I did it using:

my @plain = split(/\n/,$plaintext);

However, there are many blank elements in @plain. It has 572 elements and about half of them are empty.

Am I doing anything wrong here? What do I need to add/change in my code to get rid of the blank elements?

Answer 1

grep the output so you only get entries that contain non-whitepace characters.

my @plain = grep { /\S/ } split(/\n/,$plaintext);

Answer 2

The correct way to do it is here from @dave-cross

Quick and dirty if you're not up for fixing your split:

foreach(@plain){
    if( ( defined $_) and !($_ =~ /^$/ )){
        push(@new, $_);
    }
}

edit: how it works

There are going to be more elegant and efficient ways of doing it than the above, but as with everything perl-y tmtowtdi! The way this works is:

1. Loop through the array @plain, making $_ set to current array element

   foreach(@plain){

2. Check the current element to see if we're interested in it:

   ( defined $_) # has it had any value assigned to it !($_ =~ /^$/ ) # ignore those which have been assigned a blank value eg. ''

3. If the current element passes those checks push it to @new

   push(@new, $_);