Removing whitespace in string

Question

I have the following code:

  program main
     character (len=15) :: abc = "te st tex  t"
     print *, trim(abc)      
  end program main

Which outputs:

 te st tex  t

I excepted all the whitespace to be removed but it wasn't. How can I remove all the whitespace from the string?

Answer 1

Trim will remove spaces only at the edges, not in the middle (this is common behaviour on almost all languages/libraries). If you want to remove all spaces in the string, you will have to create your own function to do this, iterating through the string.

Ex.:

program Test

implicit none

    ! Variables
    character(len=200) :: string

    ! Body of Test
    string = 'Hello World              7    9'
    print *, string
    call StripSpaces (string)
    print *, string


contains

    subroutine StripSpaces(string)
    character(len=*) :: string
    integer :: stringLen 
    integer :: last, actual

    stringLen = len (string)
    last = 1
    actual = 1

    do while (actual < stringLen)
        if (string(last:last) == ' ') then
            actual = actual + 1
            string(last:last) = string(actual:actual)
            string(actual:actual) = ' '
        else
            last = last + 1
            if (actual < last) &
                actual = last
        endif
    end do

    end subroutine

end program Test

This was tested on intel compiler, not on gfortran, but I think it will work.