R – Fixing trimws Bug for Leading Whitespace

rtrim

Edit: Thanks to R Yoda, I was finally able to create a reproducible example to the issue I am facing:

x = rawToChar(as.raw(c(0xa0, 0x31, 0x31, 0x2e, 0x31, 0x33, 0x32, 0x35, 0x39, 0x32)))
trimws(x)

=> Question: How can I trim x?

Old text of the question:
Please see attached screenshot. Unfortunately I am not able to create reproducible example as dput is affecting the result…

As anyone an idea how to investigate what's going wrong with x? The leading whitespace doesn't seem to be a standard one!

enter image description here

charToRaw(x) gives a0 31 31 2e 31 33 32 35 39 32
dput(charToRaw(x)) gives as.raw(c(0xa0, 0x31, 0x31, 0x2e, 0x31, 0x33, 0x32, 0x35, 0x39,
0x32))
Encoding(x) gives "unknown" (same as Encoding(" 11.132592"))

Best Answer

0xa0 is encoding another type of space (the non-breaking space) in R, while 0x20 is the white space.
trimws searches for white spaces or tabs or linebreaks or carriage returns (represented by [ \t\r\n]+) but not for non-breaking spaces, hence it does not work.
You can use sub (to suppress either leading or trailing spaces) or gsub (to suppress both trailing and leading spaces) to remove any kind of trailing or leading space(s) (including the one represented by 0xa0):

sub("^\\s+", "", x)
[1] "11.132592"

And for removing leading and trailing spaces:

gsub("(^\\s+)|(\\s+$)", "", x)
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