Question

How can we trim leading and trailing whitespaces in R

Answer 1

trimws {base} //Remove Leading/Trailing Whitespace

Removes leading and/or trailing whitespace from character strings.

Usage

trimws(x, which = c("both", "left", "right"))

Arguments

x

a character vector

which

a character string specifying whether to remove both leading and trailing whitespace (default), or only leading ("left") or trailing ("right"). Can be abbreviated.

Details

For portability, ‘whitespace’ is taken as the character class [ \t\r\n] (space, horizontal tab, line feed, carriage return).

Examples

x <- "  Some text. "

x

trimws(x)

trimws(x, "l")

trimws(x, "r")

The stringr package has a handy function str_trim (edited) that comes to the rescue and is straightforward to use.

First make sure that the package is available in the R session