[c++] Removing leading and trailing spaces from a string

How to remove spaces from a string object in C++.
For example, how to remove leading and trailing spaces from the below string object.

//Original string: "         This is a sample string                    "
//Desired string: "This is a sample string"

The string class, as far as I know, doesn't provide any methods to remove leading and trailing spaces.

To add to the problem, how to extend this formatting to process extra spaces between words of the string. For example,

// Original string: "          This       is         a sample   string    " 
// Desired string:  "This is a sample string"  

Using the string methods mentioned in the solution, I can think of doing these operations in two steps.

1. Remove leading and trailing spaces.
2. Use find_first_of, find_last_of, find_first_not_of, find_last_not_of and substr, repeatedly at word boundaries to get desired formatting.

neat and clean

 void trimLeftTrailingSpaces(string &input) {
        input.erase(input.begin(), find_if(input.begin(), input.end(), [](int ch) {
            return !isspace(ch);
        }));
    }

    void trimRightTrailingSpaces(string &input) {
        input.erase(find_if(input.rbegin(), input.rend(), [](int ch) {
            return !isspace(ch);
        }).base(), input.end());
    }

/// strip a string, remove leading and trailing spaces
void strip(const string& in, string& out)
{
    string::const_iterator b = in.begin(), e = in.end();

    // skipping leading spaces
    while (isSpace(*b)){
        ++b;
    }

    if (b != e){
        // skipping trailing spaces
        while (isSpace(*(e-1))){
            --e;
        }
    }

    out.assign(b, e);
}

In the above code, the isSpace() function is a boolean function that tells whether a character is a white space, you can implement this function to reflect your needs, or just call the isspace() from "ctype.h" if you want.

To add to the problem, how to extend this formatting to process extra spaces between words of the string.

Actually, this is a simpler case than accounting for multiple leading and trailing white-space characters. All you need to do is remove duplicate adjacent white-space characters from the entire string.

The predicate for adjacent white space would simply be:

auto by_space = [](unsigned char a, unsigned char b) {
    return std::isspace(a) and std::isspace(b);
};

and then you can get rid of those duplicate adjacent white-space characters with std::unique, and the erase-remove idiom:

// s = "       This       is       a sample   string     "  
s.erase(std::unique(std::begin(s), std::end(s), by_space), 
        std::end(s));
// s = " This is a sample string "  

This does potentially leave an extra white-space character at the front and/or the back. This can be removed quite easily:

if (std::size(s) && std::isspace(s.back()))
    s.pop_back();

if (std::size(s) && std::isspace(s.front()))
    s.erase(0, 1);

Here's a demo.

This is my solution for stripping the leading and trailing spaces ...

std::string stripString = "  Plamen     ";
while(!stripString.empty() && std::isspace(*stripString.begin()))
    stripString.erase(stripString.begin());

while(!stripString.empty() && std::isspace(*stripString.rbegin()))
    stripString.erase(stripString.length()-1);

The result is "Plamen"

Example for trimming leading and trailing spaces

std::string aString("    This is a string to be trimmed   ");
auto start = aString.find_first_not_of(' ');
auto end = aString.find_last_not_of(' ');
std::string trimmedString;
trimmedString = aString.substr(start, (end - start) + 1);

OR

trimmedSring = aString.substr(aString.find_first_not_of(' '), (aString.find_last_not_of(' ') - aString.find_first_not_of(' ')) + 1);

What about the erase-remove idiom?

std::string s("...");
s.erase( std::remove(s.begin(), s.end(), ' '), s.end() );

Sorry. I saw too late that you don't want to remove all whitespace.

C++17 introduced std::basic_string_view, a class template that refers to a constant contiguous sequence of char-like objects, i.e. a view of the string. Apart from having a very similar interface to std::basic_string, it has two additional functions: remove_prefix(), which shrinks the view by moving its start forward; and remove_suffix(), which shrinks the view by moving its end backward. These can be used to trim leading and trailing space:

#include <string_view>
#include <string>

std::string_view ltrim(std::string_view str)
{
    const auto pos(str.find_first_not_of(" \t"));
    str.remove_prefix(pos);
    return str;
}

std::string_view rtrim(std::string_view str)
{
    const auto pos(str.find_last_not_of(" \t"));
    str.remove_suffix(str.length() - pos - 1);
    return str;
}

std::string_view trim(std::string_view str)
{
    str = ltrim(str);
    str = rtrim(str);
    return str;
}

int main()
{
    std::string str = "   hello world   ";
    auto sv1{ ltrim(str) };  // "hello world   "
    auto sv2{ rtrim(str) };  // "   hello world"
    auto sv3{ trim(str) };   // "hello world"

    //If you want, you can create std::string objects from std::string_view objects
    auto s1{ sv1 };
    auto s2{ sv2 };
    auto s3{ sv3 };
}

Note: the std::string_view is a non-owning reference, so it's only valid as long as the original string still exists.

No boost, no regex, just the string library. It's that simple.

string trim(const string s) { // removes whitespace characters from beginnig and end of string s
    const int l = (int)s.length();
    int a=0, b=l-1;
    char c;
    while(a<l && ((c=s.at(a))==' '||c=='\t'||c=='\n'||c=='\v'||c=='\f'||c=='\r'||c=='\0')) a++;
    while(b>a && ((c=s.at(b))==' '||c=='\t'||c=='\n'||c=='\v'||c=='\f'||c=='\r'||c=='\0')) b--;
    return s.substr(a, 1+b-a);
}

void removeSpaces(string& str)
{
    /* remove multiple spaces */
    int k=0;
    for (int j=0; j<str.size(); ++j)
    {
            if ( (str[j] != ' ') || (str[j] == ' ' && str[j+1] != ' ' ))
            {
                    str [k] = str [j];
                    ++k;
            }

    }
    str.resize(k);

    /* remove space at the end */   
    if (str [k-1] == ' ')
            str.erase(str.end()-1);
    /* remove space at the begin */
    if (str [0] == ' ')
            str.erase(str.begin());
}

string trim(const string & sStr)
{
    int nSize = sStr.size();
    int nSPos = 0, nEPos = 1, i;
    for(i = 0; i< nSize; ++i) {
        if( !isspace( sStr[i] ) ) {
            nSPos = i ;
            break;
        }
    }
    for(i = nSize -1 ; i >= 0 ; --i) {
        if( !isspace( sStr[i] ) ) {
            nEPos = i;
            break;
        }
    }
    return string(sStr, nSPos, nEPos - nSPos + 1);
}

Using the standard library has many benefits, but one must be aware of some special cases that cause exceptions. For example, none of the answers covered the case where a C++ string has some Unicode characters. In this case, if you use the function isspace, an exception will be thrown.

I have been using the following code for trimming the strings and some other operations that might come in handy. The major benefits of this code are: it is really fast (faster than any code I have ever tested), it only uses the standard library, and it never causes an exception:

#include <string>
#include <algorithm>
#include <functional>
#include <locale>
#include <iostream>

typedef unsigned char BYTE;

std::string strTrim(std::string s, char option = 0)
{
    // convert all whitespace characters to a standard space
    std::replace_if(s.begin(), s.end(), (std::function<int(BYTE)>)::isspace, ' ');

    // remove leading and trailing spaces
    size_t f = s.find_first_not_of(' ');
    if (f == std::string::npos) return "";
    s = s.substr(f, s.find_last_not_of(' ') - f + 1);

    // remove consecutive spaces
    s = std::string(s.begin(), std::unique(s.begin(), s.end(),
        [](BYTE l, BYTE r){ return l == ' ' && r == ' '; }));

    switch (option)
    {
    case 'l':  // convert to lowercase
        std::transform(s.begin(), s.end(), s.begin(), ::tolower);
        return s;
    case 'U':  // convert to uppercase
        std::transform(s.begin(), s.end(), s.begin(), ::toupper);
        return s;
    case 'n':  // remove all spaces
        s.erase(std::remove(s.begin(), s.end(), ' '), s.end());
        return s;
    default: // just trim
        return s;
    }
}

Why complicate?

std::string removeSpaces(std::string x){
    if(x[0] == ' ') { x.erase(0, 1); return removeSpaces(x); }
    if(x[x.length() - 1] == ' ') { x.erase(x.length() - 1, x.length()); return removeSpaces(x); }
    else return x;
}

This works even if boost was to fail, no regex, no weird stuff nor libraries.

EDIT: Fix for M.M.'s comment.

My Solution for this problem not using any STL methods but only C++ string's own methods is as following:

void processString(string &s) {
    if ( s.empty() ) return;

    //delete leading and trailing spaces of the input string
    int notSpaceStartPos = 0, notSpaceEndPos = s.length() - 1;
    while ( s[notSpaceStartPos] == ' ' ) ++notSpaceStartPos;
    while ( s[notSpaceEndPos] == ' ' ) --notSpaceEndPos;
    if ( notSpaceStartPos > notSpaceEndPos ) { s = ""; return; }
    s = s.substr(notSpaceStartPos, notSpaceEndPos - notSpaceStartPos + 1);

    //reduce multiple spaces between two words to a single space 
    string temp;
    for ( int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++ ) {
        if ( i > 0 && s[i] == ' ' && s[i-1] == ' ' ) continue;
        temp.push_back(s[i]);
    }
    s = temp;
}

I have used this method to pass a LeetCode problem Reverse Words in a String

I've tested this, it all works. So this method processInput will just ask the user to type something in. it will return a string that has no extra spaces internally, nor extra spaces at the begining or the end. Hope this helps. (also put a heap of commenting in to make it simple to understand).

you can see how to implement it in the main() at the bottom

#include <string>
#include <iostream>

string processInput() {
  char inputChar[256];
  string output = "";
  int outputLength = 0;
  bool space = false;
  // user inputs a string.. well a char array
  cin.getline(inputChar,256);
  output = inputChar;
       string outputToLower = "";
  // put characters to lower and reduce spaces
  for(int i = 0; i < output.length(); i++){
    // if it's caps put it to lowercase
    output[i] = tolower(output[i]);
    // make sure we do not include tabs or line returns or weird symbol for null entry array thingy
    if (output[i] != '\t' && output[i] != '\n' && output[i] != 'Ì') {
      if (space) {
        // if the previous space was a space but this one is not, then space now is false and add char
        if (output[i] != ' ') {
          space = false;
          // add the char
          outputToLower+=output[i];
        }
      } else {
        // if space is false, make it true if the char is a space
        if (output[i] == ' ') {
          space = true;
        }
        // add the char
        outputToLower+=output[i];
      }
    }
  }
  // trim leading and tailing space
  string trimmedOutput = "";
  for(int i = 0; i < outputToLower.length(); i++){
    // if it's the last character and it's not a space, then add it
    // if it's the first character and it's not a space, then add it
    // if it's not the first or the last then add it
    if (i == outputToLower.length() - 1 && outputToLower[i] != ' ' || 
      i == 0 && outputToLower[i] != ' ' || 
      i > 0 && i < outputToLower.length() - 1) {
      trimmedOutput += outputToLower[i];
    } 
  }
  // return
  output = trimmedOutput;
  return output;
}

int main() {
  cout << "Username: ";
  string userName = processInput();
  cout << "\nModified Input = " << userName << endl;
}

For leading- and trailing spaces, how about:

string string_trim(const string& in) {

    stringstream ss;
    string out;
    ss << in;
    ss >> out;
    return out;

}

Or for a sentence:

string trim_words(const string& sentence) {
    stringstream ss;
    ss << sentence;
    string s;
    string out;

    while(ss >> s) {

        out+=(s+' ');
    }
    return out.substr(0, out.length()-1);
}

Here is how you can do it:

std::string & trim(std::string & str)
{
   return ltrim(rtrim(str));
}

And the supportive functions are implemeted as:

std::string & ltrim(std::string & str)
{
  auto it2 =  std::find_if( str.begin() , str.end() , [](char ch){ return !std::isspace<char>(ch , std::locale::classic() ) ; } );
  str.erase( str.begin() , it2);
  return str;   
}

std::string & rtrim(std::string & str)
{
  auto it1 =  std::find_if( str.rbegin() , str.rend() , [](char ch){ return !std::isspace<char>(ch , std::locale::classic() ) ; } );
  str.erase( it1.base() , str.end() );
  return str;   
}

And once you've all these in place, you can write this as well:

std::string trim_copy(std::string const & str)
{
   auto s = str;
   return ltrim(rtrim(s));
}

Try this

Easy removing leading, trailing and extra spaces from a std::string in one line

value = std::regex_replace(value, std::regex("^ +| +$|( ) +"), "$1");

removing only leading spaces

value.erase(value.begin(), std::find_if(value.begin(), value.end(), std::bind1st(std::not_equal_to<char>(), ' ')));

or

value = std::regex_replace(value, std::regex("^ +"), "");

removing only trailing spaces

value.erase(std::find_if(value.rbegin(), value.rend(), std::bind1st(std::not_equal_to<char>(), ' ')).base(), value.end());

or

value = std::regex_replace(value, std::regex(" +$"), "");

removing only extra spaces

value = regex_replace(value, std::regex(" +"), " ");

This might be the simplest of all.

You can use string::find and string::rfind to find whitespace from both sides and reduce the string.

void TrimWord(std::string& word)
{
    if (word.empty()) return;

    // Trim spaces from left side
    while (word.find(" ") == 0)
    {
        word.erase(0, 1);
    }

    // Trim spaces from right side
    size_t len = word.size();
    while (word.rfind(" ") == --len)
    {
        word.erase(len, len + 1);
    }
}

I am currently using these functions:

// trim from left
inline std::string& ltrim(std::string& s, const char* t = " \t\n\r\f\v")
{
    s.erase(0, s.find_first_not_of(t));
    return s;
}

// trim from right
inline std::string& rtrim(std::string& s, const char* t = " \t\n\r\f\v")
{
    s.erase(s.find_last_not_of(t) + 1);
    return s;
}

// trim from left & right
inline std::string& trim(std::string& s, const char* t = " \t\n\r\f\v")
{
    return ltrim(rtrim(s, t), t);
}

// copying versions

inline std::string ltrim_copy(std::string s, const char* t = " \t\n\r\f\v")
{
    return ltrim(s, t);
}

inline std::string rtrim_copy(std::string s, const char* t = " \t\n\r\f\v")
{
    return rtrim(s, t);
}

inline std::string trim_copy(std::string s, const char* t = " \t\n\r\f\v")
{
    return trim(s, t);
}

    char *str = (char*) malloc(50 * sizeof(char));
    strcpy(str, "    some random string (<50 chars)  ");

    while(*str == ' ' || *str == '\t' || *str == '\n')
            str++;

    int len = strlen(str);

    while(len >= 0 && 
            (str[len - 1] == ' ' || str[len - 1] == '\t' || *str == '\n')
    {
            *(str + len - 1) = '\0';
            len--;
    }

    printf(":%s:\n", str);

Boost string trim algorithm

#include <boost/algorithm/string/trim.hpp>

[...]

std::string msg = "   some text  with spaces  ";
boost::algorithm::trim(msg);

Example for trim leading and trailing spaces following jon-hanson's suggestion to use boost (only removes trailing and pending spaces):

#include <boost/algorithm/string/trim.hpp>

std::string str = "   t e s t    ";

boost::algorithm::trim ( str );

Results in "t e s t"

There is also

• trim_left results in "t e s t "
• trim_right results in " t e s t"

void TrimWhitespaces(std::wstring& str)
{
    if (str.empty())
        return;

    const std::wstring& whitespace = L" \t";
    std::wstring::size_type strBegin = str.find_first_not_of(whitespace);
    std::wstring::size_type strEnd = str.find_last_not_of(whitespace);

    if (strBegin != std::wstring::npos || strEnd != std::wstring::npos)
    {
        strBegin == std::wstring::npos ? 0 : strBegin;
        strEnd == std::wstring::npos ? str.size() : 0;

        const auto strRange = strEnd - strBegin + 1;
        str.substr(strBegin, strRange).swap(str);
    }
    else if (str[0] == ' ' || str[0] == '\t')   // handles non-empty spaces-only or tabs-only
    {
        str = L"";
    }
}

void TrimWhitespacesTest()
{
    std::wstring EmptyStr = L"";
    std::wstring SpacesOnlyStr = L"    ";
    std::wstring TabsOnlyStr = L"           ";
    std::wstring RightSpacesStr = L"12345     ";
    std::wstring LeftSpacesStr = L"     12345";
    std::wstring NoSpacesStr = L"12345";

    TrimWhitespaces(EmptyStr);
    TrimWhitespaces(SpacesOnlyStr);
    TrimWhitespaces(TabsOnlyStr);
    TrimWhitespaces(RightSpacesStr);
    TrimWhitespaces(LeftSpacesStr);
    TrimWhitespaces(NoSpacesStr);

    assert(EmptyStr == L"");
    assert(SpacesOnlyStr == L"");
    assert(TabsOnlyStr == L"");
    assert(RightSpacesStr == L"12345");
    assert(LeftSpacesStr == L"12345");
    assert(NoSpacesStr == L"12345");
}