How do I trim leading/trailing whitespace in a standard way?

Question

Is there a clean, preferably standard method of trimming leading and trailing whitespace from a string in C? I\'d roll my own, but I would think this is a common problem wit

Answer 1

Here i use the dynamic memory allocation to trim the input string to the function trimStr. First, we find how many non-empty characters exist in the input string. Then, we allocate a character array with that size and taking care of the null terminated character. When we use this function, we need to free the memory inside of main function.

#include
#include

char *trimStr(char *str){
char *tmp = str;
printf("input string %s\n",str);
int nc = 0;

while(*tmp!='\0'){
  if (*tmp != ' '){
  nc++;
 }
 tmp++;
}
printf("total nonempty characters are %d\n",nc);
char *trim = NULL;

trim = malloc(sizeof(char)*(nc+1));
if (trim == NULL) return NULL;
tmp = str;
int ne = 0;

while(*tmp!='\0'){
  if (*tmp != ' '){
     trim[ne] = *tmp;
   ne++;
 }
 tmp++;
}
trim[nc] = '\0';

printf("trimmed string is %s\n",trim);

return trim; 
 }


int main(void){

char str[] = " s ta ck ove r fl o w  ";

char *trim = trimStr(str);

if (trim != NULL )free(trim);

return 0;
}