Trim the left side (ltrim)

Description

Removes all the extra spaces from the beginning of a string.

How does it work in the search window?

This operation needs only one argument:

Argument	Data type

Argument	Data type
String to be trimmed ^mandatory	string

The data type of the new column is string.

Example

The examples in this article use values in a data table generated from the following CSV file.

If you want to try the example for yourself, download the file and upload it to your domain clicking Data upload in the navigation pane. Name the new table my.upload.trim.operation and select Current date as Date parsing type. Learn more about uploading data in Uploading log files.

After receiving the confirmation message, you can access the table from the Finder, selecting my → upload → trim → operation. When you upload data from a file, all the information is included in a single column called message. To split the values and extract those we need for this operation into a new column, you can use the Split operation. Click Toggle Query Editor in the search window toolbar and paste the following LINQ query to save time:

from my.upload.trim.operation
select split(message, ",", 1) as `-1to1Values`

Select Create column from the query toolbar and select Trim the left side as the operation. Call it trim_left.

The arguments needed are:

String to be trimmed - -1to1Values column

The result is not visible in the interface, since the search window table automatically trims blank spaces at both sides of the strings. Select Download from the toolbar and download the data as a CSV to see the data trimmed.

How does it work in LINQ?

Use the operator select... as... and add the operation syntax to create the new column. This is the syntax of the Trim the left side operation:

ltrim(string)

Example

Copy the following LINQ script and try the above example:

from my.upload.trim.operation
select split(message, ",", 1) as `-1to1Values`
select ltrim(`-1to1Values`) as usrcol1