without resorting to regular expressions (which are definitely an overkill for this particular purpose)?

Sure, just write your own function to do it. Having written that you will then come to the conclusion that regular expressions are definitely not an overkill for this particular purpose.

This is clearly an important special case. ... which clearly is an abuse of regex.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

🦛

In reply to Re: How to trim a line from leading and trailing blanks without using regex or non-standard modules by hippo
in thread How to trim a line from leading and trailing blanks without using regex or non-standard modules by likbez

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