[R] removing leading/trailing blanks

[Sundar Dorai-Raj]

Douglas Grove wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What's the best way of dropping leading or trailing
> blanks from a character string?  
> 
> The only thing I can think of is using sub() to replace
> blanks with null strings, but I don't know if there is
> a better way (I also don't know how to represent the
> trailing blank in a regular expression).
> 


I would use gsub instead:

R> ch = "    lkj df klj lkjsdf  "
R> ch
[1] "    lkj df klj lkjsdf  "
R> gsub("^ .", "", ch) # remove leading white space
[1] "lkj df klj lkjsdf  "
R> gsub(". $", "", ch) # remove trailing white space
[1] "    lkj df klj lkjsdf"
R>

Regards,
Sundar