Comments on: I couldn’t live without “Trim Whitespace”

By: Jim Kring

Jim Kring — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:26:26 +0000

Ben: Trim Whitespace“>Trim Whitespace can be useful for treating user-typed input or when trying to parse data from strings. Usually, it just adds a little insurance that the software will be more robust and work properly. Typically, you’ll want this after you convert delimited strings to arrays and you’ll want to make sure that you remove any leading and trailing whitespace around the data. For example, if you have the string:

” Monkey, Fish, Dog , Cat “

You might use String to 1D Array to convert this into the array:

[" Monkey", " Fish", " Dog ", " Cat "]

Passing this array into Trim Whitespace will return the array we really wanted:

["Monkey", "Fish", "Dog", "Cat"]

I hope that was a realistic enough example. It was the best I could do, having not had my first cup of coffee yet, this morning

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:30:58 +0000

Dumb question time!

What kind of applications do Y’all develop that Trim White Space is so valuable?

I go three months or so between asking myslef “Where did I last see the “Trim White Spae” function?

Just curious,

Ben

By: Jim Kring

Jim Kring — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:26:24 +0000

John: I’ll often put this in my user interface code, inside the MyString Value Changed event, before I write the data to the data store.

Aristos: As they say, great minds think alike. Too bad NI doesn’t use OpenG, internally. It could probably save you all a lot of time

By: Aristos Queue

Aristos Queue — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:55:02 +0000

I can end to the rumor that OpenG inspired the one in NI’s palettes. The rumor is false. I and another developer wrote Trim Whitespace.vi. Until this article, I didn’t even know that OpenG had an equivalent. We needed it, so we wrote it. You see, it just happens that Trim Whitespace was a VI that I couldn’t live without either.

By: john brohan

john brohan — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:38:46 +0000

This is truly one of my most frequently used Open G vi’s. Unfortunately I often forget it until a comparison fails in practice and I track it down to an untrimmed string. (The same goes for the toupper and tolower functions too. )

It is much rarer to need to compare two strings exactly than to compare to see if they are what a ‘regular human being’ would consider equal.

Well done
Keep up the good work.

By: Jim Kring

Jim Kring — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:54:45 +0000

There’s even a theory going around that it was the OpenG version that inspired the VI that ships with LabVIEW

By: Omar Mussa

Omar Mussa — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:49:06 +0000

I think that the best feature of this VI is that it is polymorphic. Otherwise, there is a LabVIEW VI ‘{vi.lib}\Utility\error.llb\Trim Whitespace.vi’ that is available (not sure what version it started but I believe it was LabVIEW 8.0).