[R] Trim function ?

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On 9 May 2002, Douglas Bates wrote:

> 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.

In today's R-devel
> sub('\\s+$', '', str, perl = TRUE)
[1] "Now is the time"

but as it was literally added a few hours ago, don't expect it to have
bedded down yet.  (I have support under Windows, but no connectivity to
commit it at present.)

-- 
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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