Sometimes when I am parsing dirty text, there are tabs mixed with spaces, and even other whitespace characters. So, the "trim" function almost does what I want, but because it is limited to a single character, it doesn't work on such dirty text.
So, I request that in the "trim" section, you add words similar to this:
To trim arbitrary whitespace from the beginning and end of a string, you can do this:
(set 'str " t Hello World!t t")
(replace "^s+|s+$" str "")
=> "Hello World!"
I suggest you add this to the documentation, because as a new user, when I want to "trim" the whitespace from the edges of my strings, the "trim" function is the first place I look. And I imagine this isn't an uncommon case. I actually haven't ever needed to use the trim function in its current form.
Or if you added a "regex" version of trim, with a trailing regex options parameter, then I could do
(trim " t foo t " "s" 0) => "foo"
In version 10.6.3, the simple
> (trim " n t h e l l o r ")
"h e l l o"
>
http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/development/inprogress/
Thank you Lutz! No joy on a regex enabled version of trim? :) True, true, we do have (replace) for that. Perhaps a note and a link in the Manual telling people that "for more complex cases, (replace) will do the job...".
There is a comment now: http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/development/inprogress/newlisp_manual.html#trim