Re: [bug-gnulib] new module proposal: strip

[Bruno Haible]

Hello,

Davide Angelocola wrote:
> this module defines three functions:
> chomp()  strip leading whitespaces
> chug() strip trailing whitespaces
> strip() strip trailing and leading whitespaces

Thanks for the proposal. I think this functionality would be useful
in gnulib, but it needs a bit of polishing before your code can be included:

- The pretty standard name for this string manipulation is "trim",
  not "strip". See
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(programming)
    http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/Body/fun_string-tr_g-right-trim.html
    http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#trim()

- The function should work correctly in multibyte locales. To achieve so,
  it should use the function iswspace() or iswblank() from <wctype.h>
  and the "mbiter.h" iterators for multibyte strings.

- Functions which do side-effects are generally better rewritten as
  functions without side-effects. I.e. instead of a function
      char * strip2(char *s, int how)
  I would prefer to see a function
      char * strip2(const char *s, int how)
  that allocates its result with "xalloc.h".

Bruno