[R] Trim function ?

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On 9 May 2002, Ernesto Jardim wrote:

> I've imported some data from a oracle database and the strings have a
> lot of blank space (because of the delimiter). I want to remove these
> blanks space with something similar to a trim function.
>
> I don't find a trim function or something similar. Can someone give a
> help on this ?

sub() can do this (and far, far more).  Do you want to trim leading or
trailing spaces or all spaces or what.  For trailing spaces
sub(" +$", "", x)

will do what you want.  For spaces both ends and no embedded spaces
sub(" *([^ ]+) *", "\\1", x)

and so on.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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