29 Jul
2001
29 Jul
'01
11:05 p.m.
On 29 Jul 2001, at 13:57, Frank Tegtmeyer wrote:
What did Trim() do?
trim() typically removes whitespace at the beginning and end of a string. I first saw it in dBase about 15 years ago, I think.
<Grin> I first saw it in SNOBOL4 (developed at Bell Telephone Labs, in 1962). Quoting from Griswold et al "The Snobol 4 Programming Language, 2. ed, '71, p. 82: "3.4.3 TRIM TRIM is a primitive function whose argument must be a string or an integer. The value of TRIM is a string which is the argument value with all trailing blanks removed." I still miss Snobol4's clean, but powerfull pattern match, sometimes. Compared to that, re is an ugly mess. -- ws