How to suppress blank space before a value

Question

Country<-c(" Germany"," France", "Greece"," United-State", "Spain")
Country

There are blank spaces for example before Germany, France and United-State

[1] " Germany"      " France"       "Greece"        " United-State" "Spain"

I want to suppress all the the blank spaces before the country names, in order to have some like this:

[1] "Germany"      "France"       "Greece"        "United-State" "Spain"

akrun · Answer 1 · 2020-11-21T21:41:37.107

2

We can use trimws from base R (no packages used)

Country <- trimws(Country)
Country
#[1] "Germany"      "France"       "Greece"       "United-State" "Spain"

Or with sub

sub("^\\s+", "", Country)

edited Nov 21 '20 at 21:41

answered Nov 21 '20 at 21:33

akrun

Eric · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-21T21:43:05.277

Here is a solution using str_trim from the stringr package in order to remove whitespace from the start and end of a string.

Code:

library(stringr)

Country<-c(" Germany"," France", "Greece"," United-State", "Spain")

str_trim(Country)

Output:

[1] "Germany"      "France"       "Greece"       "United-State" "Spain"

Original:

[1] " Germany"      " France"       "Greece"        " United-State" "Spain"

^{Created on 2020-11-21 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

2 Answers2