MATLAB: Isn’t strtrim working on the string

MATLAB

Hi,

I have a simple string, that has many leading spaces: a = ' abcd' I want to remove the white space by using strtrim, but it is not working. I used ['|' a '|'] and then newchr = strtrim(a) but the newchr still has the leading spaces. Why?

The string a is read from excel file which I tried to remove the spaces but also failed.

Thanks,

Jennifer

Best Answer

Your whitespace might be "significant", as mentioned in the documentation for strtrim.

For example, if you do

s = [char(160) 'abcd']
strtrim(s)

then the strtrim command will have no effect.

What do you get for these whitespace characters if you type

double(s)

where s is your string?

You could use regexprep to get rid of significant whitespace:

s = regexprep(s,char(160),'')

You'll need to take care of not removing those special characters from other places.

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