Trimming Leading And Trailing Spaces From A String

[cncah]

I've tried and tried to figure out how to go about this but am banging my head against a wall. I'm trying to strip any empty spaces from the beginning and ending of a string. Does anyone have any pointers here? I've looked at strstr, scan, and brksps. I've got the strstr working as far as telling me if the string contains a space but I was wondering if there is a way of doing a substring function on a loop possibly? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Colin Gilchrist]

What string are you working with? Is this for something like outputting Comment Strings?

 

The reason I ask is because MP will automatically output a space character between the open and close parenthesis characters, and the string being output. This 'auto space output' behavior is controlled by the value of the 'spaces$' variable. You might try this before the string:

 

spaces$ = zero

.

.

Pbld, n$, sopen_prn, swhatever, sclose_prn, e$

.

.

spaces$ = one

[cncah]

I am modifying the spaces$ variable when modifying comments like this:

sav_spc = spaces$
spaces$ = 0

#Do some some stuff here

spaces$ = sav_spc

But the reason I'm doing this is that the company I work at has a LARGE custom tooling

library and a lot of the tool descriptions have been entered incorrectly and have anywhere

from 1 to 5 empty spaces before and after the actual description. Causing the tool comments

and the tool header coming out looking all wonky. I know it's just fluff stuff, but the operators

on the shop floor complain to no end about it, asking us to take them out and pretty them up.

So I'm getting real tired of having to modify comments every time I post something. The only

way I have found to get around this is to modify the description on every new toolpath I create,

but I would like to be able to post and go. And nobody has the kind of time to go into the tool

databases and modify every tool in those databases.

[Sparky961]

I realize I'm 7 years late to the party, but since Google searches still direct people like me here I'll share the very simple and elegant solution I used:

 

s_some_string = regex("\S.*\S", s_some_string, 0) # Strip leading/trailing whitespace