When to use chomp?

Question

What is the purpose and advantages of chomp function. What all can it do? Does using chomp creates any problems? or using chomp after file opening is necessary?

What is wrong with the [documentation for chomp](http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html)? — Quentin, Sep 27 '12 at 10:43

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 27 '12 at 11:22

chomp is used to remove the $/ variable which is set to mostly \n (new line).

$/ is the input record separator, newline by default.

chomp: It returns the total number of characters removed from all its arguments. It's often used to remove the newline from the end of an input record.

paxdiablo · Answer 2 · 2012-09-27T10:50:59.510

6

chomp simply removes the newline (actually $/) from the end of a string if it is there. It's useful when reading lines from a file (for example) where you want the newline gone, but can still be used on strings that don't have the newline.

It's basically similar to:

chop if /\n$/;

See http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html for more detail.

edited Sep 27 '12 at 10:50

answered Sep 27 '12 at 10:45

paxdiablo

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 27 '12 at 10:45

chomp removes the newline characters (if any) from the end of a line of text. It is useful because, then you don't have to worry about the particular way that your input represents newlines--Perl handles the details for you.

When should you use it? Whenever you need to remove trailing newlines! Reading data from a text file is the most common case.

When to use chomp?

3 Answers3