There are situations where we are working with character strings
extracted from various sources and it can be annoying when there
is white space at the beginning and/or end of the strings. This
whitespace can cause problems when attemping to sort, subset or
various other common operations. The stringr package has a handy
function str_trim (edited) that comes to the rescue and is
straightforward to use. First up make sure that the package is
available in the R session: Here is a basic example with a
simple string: > " This is an example of whitespace. "  " This
is an example of whitespace. " > str_trim(" This is an example
of whitespace. ")  "This is an example of whitespace." As we can
see this is very simple and is set up to work on a vector of
character strings as well.