R: Remove Leading/Trailing Whitespace From A String

StrTrim {DescTools} | R Documentation

## Remove Leading/Trailing Whitespace From A String

### Description

The function removes all spaces, tabs and newlines from the beginning and end of the supplied string. If these whitespace characters occur in the middle of the string, they are preserved.
Trimming with method `"left"` deletes only leading whitespaces, `"right"` only trailing. Designed for users who were socialized by SQL.

### Usage

    StrTrim(x, pattern = " \t\n", method = "both")

### Arguments

`x` | the string to be trimmed.
`pattern` | the pattern of the whitespaces to be deleted, defaults to space, tab and newline: `" \t\n"`.
`method` | one out of `"both"` (default), `"left"`, `"right"`. Determines on which side the string should be trimmed.

### Details

The functions are defined depending on method as
`both: gsub( pattern=gettextf("^[%s]+|[%s]+$", pattern, pattern), replacement="", x=x)`
`left: gsub( pattern=gettextf("^[%s]+",pattern), replacement="", x=x)`
`right: gsub( pattern=gettextf("[%s]+$",pattern), replacement="", x=x)`

### Value

the string x without whitespaces

### Author(s)

Andri Signorell <andri@signorell.net>

### See Also

String functions: `trimws`, `nchar`, `match`, `grep`, `regexpr`, `substr`, `sub`, `gsub`, `StrTrunc`, `StrDist`

### Examples

    StrTrim("  Hello world! ")

    StrTrim("  Hello world! ", method="left")
    StrTrim("  Hello world! ", method="right")

    # user defined pattern
    StrTrim(" ..Hello ... world! ", pattern=" \\.")

[Package DescTools version 0.99.35 Index]