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

Another option is to use the stri_trim function from the stringi package which defaults to removing leading and trailing whitespace:

> x <- c("  leading space","trailing space   ")
> stri_trim(x)
[1] "leading space"  "trailing space"

For only removing leading whitespace, use stri_trim_left. For only removing trailing whitespace, use stri_trim_right. When you want to remove other leading or trailing characters, you have to specify that with pattern =.

See also ?stri_trim for more info.