I was writing a subroutine to extract fields from lines of text when I
ran into an issue. I have reproduced this error on Perl 5.8 on AIX,
5.8 on Linux and 5.6 on Windows.

############### CUT HERE ###############
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my @list = ("field1       field2 field3");

sub stripws($)
{
    $_[0] =~ s/\s//g;
    return $_[0];

foreach (@list)
{
    my $x = stripws(substr($_,10,10));
    print "$x\n";
############### CUT HERE ###############

Here 'field2' represents a variable-length field. I want to strip out
that column, remove whitespace from it, and assign it to $x. You would
expect $x to be equal to 'field2', but instead $x is 'field2fiel', as
if it is stripping the whitespace before calling the stripws()
function.

Is there something I am missing here or is this a bug?

Thanks in advance.