How to delete the leading and trailing whitespace of a string in Ruby

When programming, from time to time you will encounter strings in the format of " some leading whitespace" or "some trailing whitespace ". You can remove these spaces through the use of methods on the String object, lstrip and rstrip.

lstrip will delete all the whitespace characters that are present before the first non whitespace character in a string.

=> "  some leading whitespace".lstrip
"some leading whitespace"

rstrip will delete all the whitespace characters that are present after the last non whitespace character in a string.

=> "some trailing whitespace  ".rstrip
"some trailing whitespace"

To delete both the leading and trailing whitespace you can use the strip method.

=> "    some leading trailing whitespace  ".strip
"some leading trailing whitespace"

Further reading:

• How to replace the contents of a string in Ruby