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 is how I do it. It trims the string in place, so no worry about deallocating a returned string or losing the pointer to an allocated string. It may not be the shortest answer possible, but it should be clear to most readers.

#include 
#include 
void trim_str(char *s)
{
    const size_t s_len = strlen(s);

    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < s_len; i++)
    {
        if (!isspace( (unsigned char) s[i] )) break;
    }

    if (i == s_len)
    {
        // s is an empty string or contains only space characters

        s[0] = '\0';
    }
    else
    {
        // s contains non-space characters

        const char *non_space_beginning = s + i;

        char *non_space_ending = s + s_len - 1;
        while ( isspace( (unsigned char) *non_space_ending ) ) non_space_ending--;

        size_t trimmed_s_len = non_space_ending - non_space_beginning + 1;

        if (s != non_space_beginning)
        {
            // Non-space characters exist in the beginning of s

            memmove(s, non_space_beginning, trimmed_s_len);
        }

        s[trimmed_s_len] = '\0';
    }
}