Perl: function to trim string leading and trailing whitespace

Is there a built-in function to trim leading and trailing whitespace such that trim(" hello world ") eq "hello world"?

Here's one approach using a regular expression:

$string =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g ;     # remove both leading and trailing whitespace

Perl 6 will include a trim function:

$string .= trim;

Source: Wikipedia

This is available in String::Util with the trim method:

^{Editor's note: String::Util is not a core module, but you can install it from CPAN with [sudo] cpan String::Util.}

use String::Util 'trim';
my $str = "  hello  ";
$str = trim($str);
print "string is now: '$str'\n";

prints:

string is now 'hello'

However it is easy enough to do yourself:

$str =~ s/^\s+//;
$str =~ s/\s+$//;

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