How can you automatically remove trailing whitespace in vim

Question

I am getting \'trailing whitespace\' errors trying to commit some files in git.

I want to remove these trailing whitespace characters automatically right before I sa

Answer 1

Compilation of above plus saving cursor position:

fun! StripTrailingWhitespaces()
    let l = line(".")
    let c = col(".")
    keepp %s/\s\+$//e
    call cursor(l, c)
endfun

autocmd FileType c,cpp,java,php,ruby,python autocmd BufWritePre  :call StripTrailingWhitespaces()

If you want to apply this on save to any file, leave out the second autocmd and use a wildcard *:

autocmd BufWritePre * :call StripTrailingWhitespaces()