chop

NAME

chop - remove the last character from a string

SYNOPSIS

chop VARIABLE

chop LIST

chop

DESCRIPTION

Chops off the last character of a string and returns the character chopped. It's used primarily to remove the newline from the end of an input record, but is much more efficient than s/\n// because it neither scans nor copies the string. If VARIABLE is omitted, chops $_ . Example:

while (<>) { chop; # avoid \n on last field @array = split(/:/); ... }

You can actually chop anything that's an lvalue, including an assignment:

chop($cwd = `pwd`); chop($answer = <STDIN>);

If you chop a list, each element is chopped. Only the value of the last chop is returned.

Note that chop returns the last character. To return all but the last character, use substr($string, 0, -1) .