Remove blank lines from beginning of file

I'm hopelessly stuck on this -- I'm trying to remove the blank lines from the beginning of a text file. (remove all lines up to when the first line with a-z characters shows up) I'm assuming that they're newline (\n), but I'm also trying with \r to strip them out to no avail.

$text_filepath = "C:/web/htdocs/word2text/test";
opendir(TFP, $text_filepath) || die("Cannot open directory");
@textfiles = readdir(TFP);
closedir(TFP); 

foreach $file (@textfiles)
{
 unless ( ($file eq ".") || ($file eq "..") )
 {
$files_loc = "$text_filepath/$file";
print "Opening $file<br>\n";
open (ARTICLE, ">>", "$files_loc") || die "couldn't open the file!";
while (<ARTICLE>) {
if ($_ =~ m/[a-z]/i)  {last;}
else {$_ =~ s/(.*)//g; print "Blank Line <br />\n";}
}
close(ARTICLE);
}
}

Code (markup):

If the above encounters a line with word characters (a-z) in it, it just moves on to the next file. However, I am not triggering the 'else', or I'm not doing something right.... It took me a few minutes to figure out how to read & parse Word files, but it's taking me hours to figure out how to remove empty lines from the beginning of a text file.

This is perl, but I'm assuming that php would be similar enough so maybe somebody has an idea on what's wrong here.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

I don't know perl but why don't you apply the following algorithm :

1) split (explode) the file after the character \n so you'll have each line in to an array of lines
2) while (empty line ) { go to next line}
3) put back the remaining lines in the file and save it.

 

That would have worked, but I was able to fix the file beforehand by eliminating the possibility of empty leading lines while the file was being created.

Thank you for the response.