Excel trim function is removing spaces in middle of text - this was unexpected

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It was surprising (?) that the Excel trim function would remove spaces in the middle of text. I mistakenly believed that the excel trim function was used to remove leading and trailing spaces. For instance, "Last Obs Resp" becomes the value of a cell with the value =Trim("Last Obs Resp")

Sure enough, Microsoft documents it this way: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/trim-function-410388fa-c5df-49c6-b16c-9e5630b479f9

I am used to the Oracle database trim function which only removes leading and trailing spaces. https://www.techonthenet.com/oracle/functions/trim.php

Was the excel Trim function always this way?

Excel does not have ltrim and rtrim functions.. i.e. I can't do: =RTRIM(Ltrim("Last Obs Resp"))

I wonder how I achieve the equivalent in Excel when I don't want to remove doubled-up spaces in the middle of the string.

Oct 17, 2022 in Others by Kithuzzz
• 38,010 points
566 views

1 answer to this question.

0 votes

Create a UDF that uses VBA's version of Trim which does not touch the inner spaces. Only removing the leading and trailing spaces

Function MyTrim(str As String) As String
    MyTrim = Trim(str)
End Function

Then you can call it from the worksheet:

=MyTrim(A1)

If you want a formula to do it:

=MID(LEFT(A1,AGGREGATE(14,6,ROW($XFD$1:INDEX(XFD:XFD,LEN(A1)))/(MID(A1,ROW($XFD$1:INDEX(XFD:XFD,LEN(A1))),1)<>" "),1)),AGGREGATE(15,6,ROW($XFD$1:INDEX(XFD:XFD,LEN(A1)))/(MID(A1,ROW($XFD$1:INDEX(XFD:XFD,LEN(A1))),1)<>" "),1),999)

enter image description here

answered Oct 18, 2022 by narikkadan
• 63,420 points

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