Chops off the last character of a string and returns the character
chopped. It's used primarily to remove the newline from the end of an
input record, but is much more efficient than s/\n//
because it neither
scans nor copies the string. If VARIABLE is omitted, chops
$_.
Example:
You can actually chop anything that's an lvalue, including an assignment:
If you chop a list, each element is chopped. Only the value of the last chop is returned.
Note that chop returns the last character. To return all but the last character, use substr($string, 0, -1) .