[R] strip white in character strings

[Jeremiah Rounds]

> Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 12:06:39 -0400
> From: roland.rproject at gmail.com
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] strip white in character strings
>
> Dear all,
>
> I have several datasets and I want to generate pdf plots from them.
> I also want to generate automatically the names of the files. They are
> country-specific and the element mycurrentdata[1,1] contains this
> information.
>
> So what I do is something like this:
> pdf(file=paste(mycurrentdata[1,1], ".pdf", sep=""), width=...etc)
>
> The only problem I have is that some of the country names contain white
> space (e.g., "United Kingdom"). This is no problem for generating the
> pdf plots but it may become problematic during further processing (e.g.
> incl. the plots in LaTeX documents).
>
> Is there an easy function to strip white space out of character strings
> (similar to the strip.white=TRUE option in read.table/scan)?


How about 


> a = " United Kingdom  "
> paste(unlist(strsplit(a,split=" ")), collapse="")
[1] "UnitedKingdom"

Note better might is using generic trimming functions after the split to catch any left over non-space white space stuff in each split.










>
> I'd appreciate any kind of help and I hope I did not miss anything
> completely obvious.
>
> Thanks,
> Roland
>
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