Improved Trim$ Statement

The Visual Basic Trim$() function has a serious shortcoming in that it only handles space characters and not all of the usual white spaces such as tabs, carriage returns, and line feeds.

The following functions is interchangeable with the standard Trim , but will handle all of the white spaces. In fact, if you look closely, you will discover that it can be configured to trim off any character that you would like.

public Function TrimAll(ToTrim as string) as string

    Dim Start, Finish as Integer
    Dim ToEliminate as string

    ' Base condition test
    If len(ToTrim) = 0 then
        TrimAll = ""
        Exit Function
    End If

    ' Define the characters that we want to trim off
    ToEliminate = Chr(0) & Chr(8) & Chr(9) & Chr(10) & _
                  Chr(13) & Chr(32)

    ' Find the beginning of non-blank string
    Start = 1
    While InStr(1, ToEliminate, mid$(ToTrim, Start, 1), _
                vbTextCompare) <> 0 And Start <= len(ToTrim)
        Start = Start + 1
    Wend

    ' Find the end of non-blank string
    Finish = len(ToTrim)
    While InStr(1, ToEliminate, mid$(ToTrim, Finish, 1), _
                vbTextCompare) <> 0 And Finish > 1
        Finish = Finish - 1
    Wend
    '
    ' If the string is completely blank, Start is going to be greater 
    ' than Finish
    '
    If Start > Finish then
        TrimAll = ""
        Exit Function
    End If

    ' Trim out the real contents
    TrimAll = mid$(ToTrim, Start, Finish - Start + 1)

End Function