Trim leading and trailing spaces from a string in awk

Question

I\'m trying to remove leading and trailing space in 2nd column of the below input.txt:

Name, Order  
Trim, working

Answer 1

Warning by @Geoff: see my note below, only one of the suggestions in this answer works (though on both columns).

I would use sed:

sed 's/, /,/' input.txt

This will remove on leading space after the , . Output:

Name,Order
Trim,working
cat,cat1

More general might be the following, it will remove possibly multiple spaces and/or tabs after the ,:

sed 's/,[ \t]\?/,/g' input.txt

It will also work with more than two columns because of the global modifier /g

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@Floris asked in discussion for a solution that removes trailing and and ending whitespaces in each colum (even the first and last) while not removing white spaces in the middle of a column:

sed 's/[ \t]\?,[ \t]\?/,/g; s/^[ \t]\+//g; s/[ \t]\+$//g' input.txt

*EDIT by @Geoff, I've appended the input file name to this one, and now it only removes all leading & trailing spaces (though from both columns). The other suggestions within this answer don't work. But try: " Multiple spaces , and 2 spaces before here " *

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IMO sed is the optimal tool for this job. However, here comes a solution with awk because you've asked for that:

awk -F', ' '{printf "%s,%s\n", $1, $2}' input.txt

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Another simple solution that comes in mind to remove all whitespaces is tr -d:

cat input.txt | tr -d ' '