Trimming Whitespace From Beginning and end of Text Lines

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-05-12 11:27, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> This fails to remove multiple occurences of the [[:space:]] class.
>>
>> There are at least the following ways:
>>
>> 	sed -i -e 's/^[[:space:]]*' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' file ...
>> 	perl -pi -e 's/^\s*(\S.*\S)[ \t]*$/$1/' file ...
>>
>> The first one seems more straightforward to me most of the time,
>> but there are times I find Perl's `-pi -e ...' idiom very convenient.
>
> It is, and I wish to acknowledge the above are entirely valid solutions
> to the problem, but...
>
>   python -c 'import sys; print sys.stdin.read().strip()' < file...
>
> ...has the advantage of being human readable.  My old 300-baud accoustic
> modem used to generate output which in hindsight looks astonishingly
> close to regex character classes.  :-)

HEH!  I see the joke about Perl being similar to "line noise" is not
something local to our Greek IRC channels :)