How can I trim leading and trailing white space?

Question

I am having some troubles with leading and trailing white space in a data.frame.

For example, I like to take a look at a specific row in a data.fra

Answer 1

Use grep or grepl to find observations with white spaces and sub to get rid of them.

names<-c("Ganga Din\t", "Shyam Lal", "Bulbul ")
grep("[[:space:]]+$", names)
[1] 1 3
grepl("[[:space:]]+$", names)
[1]  TRUE FALSE  TRUE
sub("[[:space:]]+$", "", names)
[1] "Ganga Din" "Shyam Lal" "Bulbul"