pl/perl Documentation

Hi all

I'm trying to find documentation for postgres/plperl.

the online postgres documentation has only two examples in it and i am
struggling to find any more that i can make sense of. also most of the
documents i find are about installing pl/perl. this i have done and tested
with the examples found in the online documentation.

i am a complete newbie to both perl and postgres functions, so the
documentation will almost have to have to draw pictures.

i am trying to build a function that strips whitespace.

with the following

CREATE or REPLACE FUNCTION remspace(TEXT) RETURN TEXT
AS '
    @_ =~ s/\s*//;
    return @_'
LANGUAGE 'plperl';

i keep getting:

parser: parse error at or near "return"

no matter what i do. i have a feeling this means that i have a syntax error
some where in the function, but can't figger out where. is there any way of
getting a more detailed error description?

duncan