Question

I’m trying the following

string tl = " aaa, bbb, ccc, dddd             eeeee";

var tags = new List<string>();
tags.AddRange(tl.Split(','));
tags.ForEach(x => x = x.Trim().TrimStart().TrimEnd());

var result = String.Join(",", tags.ToArray());

But it doesn’t work, the tags always come back as ” aaa”, ” bbb”.

How can I trim all elements in a list?

Answer 1

// you can omit the final ToArray call if you're using .NET 4
var result = string.Join(",", tl.Split(',').Select(s => s.Trim()).ToArray());

If you only need the final result string, rather than the intermediate collection, then you could use a regular expression to tidy the string. You’ll need to benchmark to determine whether or not the regex outperforms the split-trim-join technique:

var result = Regex.Replace(tl, @"(?<=^|,) +| +(?=,|$)", "");