[R] Trim function ?

[Douglas Bates]

Ernesto Jardim <ernesto at ipimar.pt> writes:

> Hi
> 
> 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 ?

If you want to remove trailing blanks you can use sub with the regular
expression ' +$'. 

> str = 'Now is the time      '
> sub(' +$', '', str, extended = TRUE)
[1] "Now is the time"

I had hoped you could use '\s+$' or '\\s+$' but that doesn't seem to
work.  I guess we would need the perl regular expression library, of
which there has been some discussion, to do that.
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