trimws: Trim Leading or Trailing Whitespaces¶

Description¶

Removes whitespaces (or other code points as specified by the whitespace argument) from left, right, or both sides of each string.

Usage¶

trimws(x, which = "both", whitespace = "\\p{Wspace}")

Arguments¶


`x`	character vector whose elements are to be trimmed
`which`	single string; either `"both"`, `"left"`, or `"right"`; side(s) from which the code points matching the `whitespace` pattern are to be removed
`whitespace`	single string; specifies the set of Unicode code points for removal, see ‘Character Classes’ in about_search_regex for more details

Details¶

Not to be confused with strtrim.

Value¶

Returns a character vector (in UTF-8).

Differences from Base R¶

Replacement for base trimws implemented with stri_replace_all_regex (and not stri_trim, which uses a slightly different syntax for pattern specifiers).

the default whitespace argument does not reflect the ‘contemporary’ definition of whitespaces (e.g., does not include zero-width spaces) [fixed here]
base R implementation is not portable as it is based on the system PCRE library (e.g., some Unicode classes may not be available or matching thereof can depend on the current LC_CTYPE category) [fixed here]
no sanity checks are performed on whitespace [fixed here]

Author(s)¶

Marek Gagolewski

See Also¶

The official online manual of stringx at https://stringx.gagolewski.com/

Related function(s): sub

Examples¶

base::trimws("NAAAAANA!!!NANAAAAA", whitespace=NA)  # stringx raises an error
## [1] "NA!!!NA"
x <- "   :)\v\u00a0 \n\r\t"
base::trimws(x)
## [1] ":)\v "
stringx::trimws(x)
## [1] ":)"