String read in from file not responding to string manipulation - string

Question

I have a Perl subroutine that creates a file, like so:
sub createFile {
if (open (OUTFILEHANDLE, ">$fileName")) {
print OUTFILEHANDLE "$desiredVariable\n";
}
close(OUTFILEHANDLE);
}
where $fileName and $desiredVariable have been previously defined. I call that, and then call the following subroutine, which reads from the file, takes the first (only) line, and saves it into the variable $desiredVariable:
sub getInfoFromFile {
if (existFile($fileName)) {
if (open (READFILEHANDLE, "<$fileName")) {
my #entire_file=<READFILEHANDLE>; # Slurp
$desiredVariable = $entire_file[0];
chop $desiredVariable;
close(READFILEHANDLE);
}
}
}
If I leave out the "chop" line, $desiredVariable is what I want, but with a trailing space newline. If I include the "chop" line, $desiredVariable is an empty string. For some reason, "chop" is killing the whole string. I've tried it with $desiredVariable =~ s/\s*$//; and several other string manipulation tricks.
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The code you included does not reproduce the problem. I'm guessing it was lost in translation somehow while you were anonymizing it. I ran the script as follows, the only adjustment I made was -f instead of existsFile().
#!/usr/bin/perl
sub createFile {
if (open (OUTFILEHANDLE, ">$fileName")) {
print OUTFILEHANDLE "$desiredVariable\n";
}
close(OUTFILEHANDLE);
}
sub getInfoFromFile {
if (-f $fileName) {
if (open (READFILEHANDLE, "<$fileName")) {
my #entire_file=<READFILEHANDLE>; # Slurp
$desiredVariable = $entire_file[0];
chop $desiredVariable;
close(READFILEHANDLE);
}
}
}
$fileName = "test.txt";
$desiredVariable = "Hello World!";
createFile();
$desiredVariable = "";
getInfoFromFile();
print "Got '$desiredVariable'\n"; # Got 'Hello World!'