[Bioperl-l] deleting string fragments?

[Jurgen Pletinckx]

If you know the location of your substring, rather than the 
contents, the following bit is useful and fast:

substr($string,$location, $length) = '';

Yes, you are assigning an empty string to a substring.
Yes, this looks evil. It's an established use of substr, 
though.

But if you need to lookup the location first (say, with
index($string, $substring)), you had better go ahead
and use the regular expression approach.

In that case, you don't need to first check whether the
substring exists, and then edit it out: 

$string =~ s/$substring//g;

will happily remove any and all occurences of the sub-
string, and will do nothing if the subtring is not 
present. 

-- 
Jurgen Pletinckx
AlgoNomics NV