Trimming leading and trail whitespace is common for data parsed from XML or JSON, however, there isn’t an equivalent method like PHP’s trim() in Objective-C, but with categories it’s easy to add functions to existing classes like NSString.

NSString+trim.m implements a class method + (NSString *)trim:(NSString *)original extends NSString to do the same thing as PHP’s trim(). Download the zip, drag NSString+trim.h and NSString+trim.m to your project and use it like this:

#import "NSString+trim.h"

NSString * trimmed = [NSString trim:whatever]; // whatever is NSString from XML or anything that needs to be trimmed

Download: NSString+trim.zip

It works on both iPhone and Mac.