Remove white space and carriage returns, line feeds

I have a perl script that reads a $message variable which is typed in by the user.

We was trying to remove all white spaces that could be in front, all white spaced at the end, extra spaced inbetween words (For example 2 spaces or more between works would be reduced to 1 space) and to remove any carriage returns or line feeds.

I am very new to Perl and have been unable to figure this out.

What I had so far was this....
$message =~ s/[\n\r\s]+//g;
But this is removing all white space even between words.

This is the input it was given...
ottocat:/lcl/apps/esm/bin>postEvent.pl -s 60 -m ' MESSAGE GOES HERE ' -g 'INFR_Apps' -i 'ISOC INSTRUCTIONS GO HERE' -t -p 'Test_Program' Testing

The -m is the message text.

However the output results in...
MESSAGEGOESHERE

It should say "MESSAGE GOES HERE"

Could somebody show me the correct format to use to remove....

1.) Front white spaces
2.) Carriage returns
3.) Line feeds
4.) End white spaces
5.) Any extra white spaces between words.
So for example if it said...
"This is a test."
It would remove the extra white space between "is" and "a".

Thank you

In three steps:


PS this does not remove non-breaking spaces (ASCII code \xA0)

Thank you very much for the help.
Could you please tell me what each line is doing?
I really want to learn this.

Wow I see its going to take me a while to learn how to do this stuff.

Which part of these 3 steps is removing the Carriage returns and line feeds if any?

1. $message =~ s/^\s+//; # removes leading white space

2. $message =~ s/\s+/ /g; # replaces sequence of white space with a single space

3. $message =~ s/\s+$//; # removes trailing white space

See:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html

Ok thanks for the help.
In order to remove carriage returns and line feeds I did this...

# Remove Carriage returns
chomp $instructions;

# Remove Line Feeds
$message =~ s/\n//g;


Does that look correct?

Again thank you for the help.

chomp() removes the last occurrence of the contents of $/ from the end of a string. See http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html

s/\n//g removes all LF characters

s/\s+$// removes all white space from the end of a string. White space is defined as \n \r \x20 \t \f See http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html and http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html