Trim whitespace from string in PERL

I like Java's String.trim() method, and so I thought I would add one for PERL:

sub trim {
     my ($self, $text) = @_;
     $text = $self
           if ref(\$self) =~ m/^SCALAR/i;
     # return empty string if $text is not defined
     return "" unless $text;
     $text =~ s/^\s+//;
     $text =~ s/\s+$//;
     return $text;
}

That is all that there is to it!

You can add this to your module, and do $self->trim($string) or you can do trim($string) ... If you have anything to add, let me know!