I am looking for a way to trim leading and trailing spaces in a character 
string in R. For example:

"       this is random text        "

should become:

"this is random text".

I have a short function to perform this task as follows:

trim <- function(str){
       str <- sub("^ +", "", str)
       str <- sub(" +$", "", str)
}

While this function does seem to work, I am curious if there's anything built 
into R that I can use instead, as that would be preferable.

Thanks in advance,
Andrew


      
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

