How trim?

[Marielle Lange]

Hi Bob,

You could also use regular expressions.

put LTrim(RTrim("   The cat sat under the mat   " )) into tResult

function LTrim pText
     get matchtext(pText, "(^[ \t]*(.*))", tFull, tPart)
     replace tFull with tPart in pText;
     return pText
end function

function RTrim pText
     get matchtext(pText, "((.*)[ \t]*$)", tFull, tPart)
     replace tFull with tPart in pText;
     return pText
end function

(^ means start of word, $ means end of word; . means any  
character; .* means any number (0 to many) of any character; [ \t]  
means either space or tab (I added tab in case you want to remove  
initial tabs as well).

> Bob Warren wrote:
>
>> Sometimes inexperienced Rev programmers have to ask questions that  
>> make them want to crawl under the table in shame because probably  
>> the answer is idiotically simple. Here is such a question.
>>
>> If I have a string, say:-
>>
>> "   The cat sat under the mat   "
>>
>> - and I want to trim off the leading and following blanks to give:-
>>
>> "The cat sat on the mat"
>>
>>
> put word 1 to -1 of myVar into mySecondVar
>
> Trimming only one end is slightly harder - in fact, the best way I  
> can think of is surprisingly complex
> put char 1 to -2 of (word 1 to -1 of (t & "="))      -- could have  
> been any non-space character
> put char 2 to -1 of (word 1 to -1 of ("=" & t))      -- could have  
> been any non-space character
>
>
> Hopefully someone else will come up with an easier way, and I will  
> slap my head in annoyance :-)
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--------
Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguist

Alternative emails: mlange at blueyonder.co.uk, M.Lange at ed.ac.uk
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