When it comes to dealing with the removal of leading and trailing whitespace, the goto method is the Trim() method of the string object.

Take these two strings:

  a boy 
 	a boy

The second one is clearly preceded by a tab.

But you can’t tell by looking that it is also succeeded by a tab.

Nor can you tell by looking that the first is preceded by a space and succeeded by another.

You can remove the whitespace like this:

var first = " a boy ";
var second = "	a boy	";

Console.WriteLine(first.Trim());

Console.WriteLine(second.Trim());

Which will print the cleaned-up versions:

a boy
a boy

Well and good - the leading and trailing whitespace characters have been removed.

However, there are times when you don’t want this. That is to say:

  1. You only want to trim the leading whitespace characters, or
  2. You only want to trim the trailing whitespace characters

There are legit reasons for this - perhaps you are parsing command line arguments, or the spaces are part of the data.

To trim only the leading whitespace, use the TrimStart() method.

Console.WriteLine(second.TrimStart());

To trim only the trailing whitespace, use the TrimEnd() method.

Console.WriteLine(second.TrimEnd());

TLDR

In addition to the Trim() method that removes all leading and trailing whitespace, you can use TrimStart() to remove just the leading whitespace and TrimEnd() to remove just the trailing whitespace.

Happy hacking!