help with perl

Hi guys, I've loaded a file, and have removed the \n using chomp. however, when I try using length($file), it counts the whitespaces along with the characters. How do I just count the characters, anything but the whitespaces?

thanks

$str = "place the string you want to count in here";
$count = $str =~ s/([a-z])/$1/gi;
print $count;

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 4play

$str = "place the string you want to count in here";
$count = $str =~ s/([a-z])/$1/gi;
print $count;

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Hi, that will just count the lowercase characters right? what about capital letters? would it be something along the lines as [a-z]||[A-Z]? also, what is the $1 for?

done it thanks for your help :)

$count = tr/a-zA-Z//;
perl -e "$_= 'blah blDh'; $count = tr/a-zA-Z//; print $count;"

perldoc perlop

or perl -e "$_= 'blah blDh'; print $count = tr/a-zA-Z//;"