Aral Balkan

To trim a string and remove whitespace and newlines:

NSString *trimmedString = [dirtyString stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];

For other character sets, see this reference page.

Comments

• Hi Aral, Thanks for the reply, I'm still more into AS3 at the moment, but maybe I should spend some more time on Cocoa. Do you have any good starting points? Where did you start? Thanks, Jankees

  by jankees on 2009-04-27 20:13:33

• I still don't understand why that language is so complex...

  by jankees on 2009-04-26 09:04:13

• It's an interesting one, jankees. It's basically C with an Smalltalk-esque messaging/OO layer. The language itself is rather easy; I believe you're balking at the conventions of the Cocoa framework (which, of course, are somewhat born out of the messaging syntax in Obj-C). Thing is, Cocoa is a very good example of literate programming: method signatures may be ridiculously long but you're not supposed to type them in yourself (XCode either auto-completes for you, or, when implementing delegate/datasource methods, you copy the method signatures out of the documentation). The documentation is an *essential* part of the development process (compare to Python, for example, where you don't need documentation, especially if you have the iPython shell, or to AS3 where you *do* need documentation and don't have it!) :) So, yes, it is a framework with verbose conventions but the whole system (IDE, documentation, etc. works really well together). I do enjoy developing with.

  by Aral on 2009-04-26 23:23:44

• Is this trimmed string autoreleased? Or should I release it after using it?

  by David Chu on 2010-04-21 03:39:41

• [...] 截去字符串的前后空格符。参考。 [...]

  by cool8jay的Mac开发心得 » iSpeLL开发日志-2010.05.13 on 2010-05-13 16:27:40

• Awesome. Thanks for publishing this, just what I needed.

  by Robert Hook on 2010-05-15 04:33:55

• thanks for this simple line... =)

  by david on 2010-10-16 14:56:27

• Mike - Your response is reasonable. But I'd argue that 98% of the time, yes, you really just want to trim whitespace. What's more elegant and easier to understand and maintain: car.startEngine(); or [car startInternalCombustionGasolinePoweredEngineWithReason:[NSReasonForStarting toOperateOnPublicRoadways]];

  by Roger on 2012-01-29 16:37:56

• Thanks, this helped me. But: What I think the commenter means by "complex" is: Trim a string in Java: ss = ss.trim(); Trim a string in Apple: ss = [ss stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]]; Just venting. I'm from the Java world and can't wait to go back. :)

  by Roger on 2012-01-22 18:13:32

• It's true that ss.trim() looks easier, but tell me, what, exactly, are you trimming? Is it just white space? I'm sure there are defaults for when nothing is specified, but at least in Obj-C/Cocoa, you know EXACTLY what's going to happen. I'm from the .NET world, and string trimming is an example of frustration for me, because it's hard to figure out exactly what happens in each case. Not with Cocoa.

  by Mike on 2012-01-27 16:15:55

• thanks a lot for this, i was searching for exactly the same thing

  by programming on 2012-06-22 12:43:04

• thanks man!

  by bengoat on 2012-10-03 13:55:24