You have a string with a specific set of characters, such as spaces, tabs, escaped single/double quotes, any type of punctuation character(s), or some other character(s), at the beginning and/or end of a string. You want a simple way to remove these characters.
Use
the Trim
, TrimEnd
, or
TrimStart
instance methods of the
String
class:
string foo = "--TEST--"; Console.WriteLine(foo.Trim(new char[1] {'-'})); // Displays "TEST" foo = ",-TEST-,-"; Console.WriteLine(foo.Trim(new char[2] {'-',','})); // Displays "TEST" foo = "--TEST--"; Console.WriteLine(foo.TrimStart(new char[1] {'-'})); // Displays "TEST--" foo = ",-TEST-,-"; Console.WriteLine(foo.TrimStart(new char[2] {'-',','})); // Displays "TEST-,-" foo = "--TEST--"; Console.WriteLine(foo.TrimEnd(new char[1] {'-'})); // Displays "--TEST" foo = ",-TEST-,-"; Console.WriteLine(foo.TrimEnd(new char[2] {'-',','})); // Displays "-,-TEST"
The Trim
method is most often used to eliminate
whitespace at the beginning and end of a string. In fact, if you call
Trim
without any parameters on a string variable,
this is exactly what would happen. The Trim
method
is overloaded to allow you to remove other types of characters from
the beginning and end of a string. You can pass in a
char[]
containing all the characters that you want
removed from the beginning and end of a string. Note that if the
characters contained in this char[]
are located
somewhere in the middle of the string, they are not removed.
The TrimStart
and TrimEnd
methods remove characters at the beginning and end of a string,
respectively. These two methods are not overloaded, similar to the
Trim
method. Rather, these two methods accept only
a char[]
. If you pass a null
into either one of these methods, only whitespace is removed from the
beginning or the end of a string.