trimws
Remove leading or trailing white space
Description
Removes from the beginning or end of a character string any spaces, tabs, or other characters that produce white space.
Usage
trimws(x, which = c("both", "left", "right"), whitespace = "[ \t\r\n]")
Arguments
  
| x | character data.  If it is not already character data, it is converted with as.character. | 
  | which | one of the following words, possibly truncated, specifying where to remove white space. |  |  | "both" | remove white space from the beginning and the end of x. The default. |  |  |  | "left" | remove white space from the beginning of x. |  |  |  | "right" | remove white space from the end of x. | 
 | 
  | whitespace | a regular expression specifying what is to be considered whitespace.  The default
value specifies ASCII space, tab, newline, and linefeed characters. | 
 
Details
White space characters include space, tab, newline, return, and
a few other characters matched by the regular expression "\s".
Value
returns an object like the input x (subjected to as.character()
if it is not character data) with the leading or trailing (or both)
white space removed.
See Also
Examples
trimws(c("  Male", "Female", "Not Known "))
trimws(c("~~Male", "Female", "Not~Known~~"), whitespace="~")