How do I trim leading/trailing whitespace in a standard way?

Question

Is there a clean, preferably standard method of trimming leading and trailing whitespace from a string in C? I\'d roll my own, but I would think this is a common problem wit

Answer 1

Very late to the party...

Single-pass forward-scanning solution with no backtracking. Every character in the source string is tested exactly once twice. (So it should be faster than most of the other solutions here, especially if the source string has a lot of trailing spaces.)

This includes two solutions, one to copy and trim a source string into another destination string, and the other to trim the source string in place. Both functions use the same code.

The (modifiable) string is moved in-place, so the original pointer to it remains unchanged.

#include 
#include 

char * trim2(char *d, const char *s)
{
    // Sanity checks
    if (s == NULL  ||  d == NULL)
        return NULL;

    // Skip leading spaces        
    const unsigned char * p = (const unsigned char *)s;
    while (isspace(*p))
        p++;

    // Copy the string
    unsigned char * dst = (unsigned char *)d;   // d and s can be the same
    unsigned char * end = dst;
    while (*p != '\0')
    {
        if (!isspace(*dst++ = *p++))
            end = dst;
    }

    // Truncate trailing spaces
    *end = '\0';
    return d;
}

char * trim(char *s)
{
    return trim2(s, s);
}