How can I trim leading and trailing white space?

Question

I am having some troubles with leading and trailing white space in a data.frame.

For example, I like to take a look at a specific row in a data.frame based on a certain condition:

> myDummy[myDummy$country == c("Austria"),c(1,2,3:7,19)] 



[1] codeHelper     country        dummyLI    dummyLMI       dummyUMI       

[6] dummyHInonOECD dummyHIOECD    dummyOECD      

<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

I was wondering why I didn't get the expected output since the country Austria obviously existed in my data.frame. After looking through my code history and trying to figure out what went wrong I tried:

> myDummy[myDummy$country == c("Austria "),c(1,2,3:7,19)]
   codeHelper  country dummyLI dummyLMI dummyUMI dummyHInonOECD dummyHIOECD
18        AUT Austria        0        0        0              0           1
   dummyOECD
18         1

All I have changed in the command is an additional white space after Austria.

Further annoying problems obviously arise. For example, when I like to merge two frames based on the country column. One data.frame uses "Austria " while the other frame has "Austria". The matching doesn't work.

1. Is there a nice way to 'show' the white space on my screen so that I am aware of the problem?
2. And can I remove the leading and trailing white space in R?

So far I used to write a simple Perl script which removes the whites pace, but it would be nice if I can somehow do it inside R.

Answer 1

As of R 3.2.0 a new function was introduced for removing leading/trailing white spaces:

trimws()

See: Remove Leading/Trailing Whitespace