How to trim leading and trailing whitespace?

Question

I am having some troubles with leading and trailing whitespace in a data.frame. Eg 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 whitespace after Austria.

Further annoying problems obviously arise. Eg 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.

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

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

Answer 1

A simple function to remove leading and trailing whitespace:

trim <- function( x ) {
  gsub("(^[[:space:]]+|[[:space:]]+$)", "", x)
}

Usage:

> text = "   foo bar  baz 3 "
> trim(text)
[1] "foo bar  baz 3"