Especially when obtaining strings from user input, they are often polluted with unneeded white space. In another recipe, we removed excess whitespace that occurred between words.
Let's now have a look at strings that are surrounded by whitespace and remove that. The std::string has some nice helper functions for getting this job done.
After reading this recipe that shows how to do this with plain string objects, make sure to also read the following recipe. There we will see how to avoid unnecessary copies or data modifications with the new std::string_view class.