You also have the Trim, TrimEnd and TrimStart methods of the System.String class. The trim method will strip whitespace (with a couple of Unicode quirks) from the leading and trailing portion of the string while allowing you to optionally specify the characters to remove.
#Note there are spaces at the beginning and end
Write-Host " ! This is a test string !%^ "
! This is a test string !%^
#Strips standard whitespace
Write-Host " ! This is a test string !%^ ".Trim()
! This is a test string !%^
#Strips the characters I specified
Write-Host " ! This is a test string !%^ ".Trim('!',' ')
This is a test string !%^
#Now removing ^ as well
Write-Host " ! This is a test string !%^ ".Trim('!',' ','^')
This is a test string !%
Write-Host " ! This is a test string !%^ ".Trim('!',' ','^','%')
This is a test string
#Powershell even casts strings to character arrays for you
Write-Host " ! This is a test string !%^ ".Trim('! ^%')
This is a test string
TrimStart and TrimEnd work the same way just only trimming the start or end of the string.