R – How to trim leading and trailing white space

rr-faqremoving-whitespacetrimwhitespace

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.frame based on a certain condition:

> myDummy[myDummy$country == c("Austria"),c(1,2,3:7,19)] 



[1] codeHelper     country        dummyLI    dummyLMI       dummyUMI       

[6] dummyHInonOECD dummyHIOECD    dummyOECD      

<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

I was wondering why I didn't get the expected output since the country Austria obviously existed in my data.frame. After looking through my code history and trying to figure out what went wrong I tried:

> myDummy[myDummy$country == c("Austria "),c(1,2,3:7,19)]
   codeHelper  country dummyLI dummyLMI dummyUMI dummyHInonOECD dummyHIOECD
18        AUT Austria        0        0        0              0           1
   dummyOECD
18         1

All I have changed in the command is an additional white space after Austria.

Further annoying problems obviously arise. For example, when I like to merge two frames based on the country column. One data.frame uses "Austria " while the other frame has "Austria". The matching doesn't work.

Is there a nice way to 'show' the white space on my screen so that I am aware of the problem?
And can I remove the leading and trailing white space in R?

So far I used to write a simple Perl script which removes the whites pace, but it would be nice if I can somehow do it inside R.

Best Answer

As of R 3.2.0 a new function was introduced for removing leading/trailing white spaces:

trimws()

See: Remove Leading/Trailing Whitespace

Related Solutions

How to trim leading/trailing whitespace in a standard way

If you can modify the string:

// Note: This function returns a pointer to a substring of the original string.
// If the given string was allocated dynamically, the caller must not overwrite
// that pointer with the returned value, since the original pointer must be
// deallocated using the same allocator with which it was allocated.  The return
// value must NOT be deallocated using free() etc.
char *trimwhitespace(char *str)
{
  char *end;

  // Trim leading space
  while(isspace((unsigned char)*str)) str++;

  if(*str == 0)  // All spaces?
    return str;

  // Trim trailing space
  end = str + strlen(str) - 1;
  while(end > str && isspace((unsigned char)*end)) end--;

  // Write new null terminator character
  end[1] = '\0';

  return str;
}

If you can't modify the string, then you can use basically the same method:

// Stores the trimmed input string into the given output buffer, which must be
// large enough to store the result.  If it is too small, the output is
// truncated.
size_t trimwhitespace(char *out, size_t len, const char *str)
{
  if(len == 0)
    return 0;

  const char *end;
  size_t out_size;

  // Trim leading space
  while(isspace((unsigned char)*str)) str++;

  if(*str == 0)  // All spaces?
  {
    *out = 0;
    return 1;
  }

  // Trim trailing space
  end = str + strlen(str) - 1;
  while(end > str && isspace((unsigned char)*end)) end--;
  end++;

  // Set output size to minimum of trimmed string length and buffer size minus 1
  out_size = (end - str) < len-1 ? (end - str) : len-1;

  // Copy trimmed string and add null terminator
  memcpy(out, str, out_size);
  out[out_size] = 0;

  return out_size;
}

Bash – How to trim whitespace from a Bash variable

A simple answer is:

echo "   lol  " | xargs

Xargs will do the trimming for you. It's one command/program, no parameters, returns the trimmed string, easy as that!

Note: this doesn't remove all internal spaces so "foo bar" stays the same; it does NOT become "foobar". However, multiple spaces will be condensed to single spaces, so "foo bar" will become "foo bar". In addition it doesn't remove end of lines characters.

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