title: Cleaning variables for unwanted leading and tail end characters
body: <p>I am grabbing values (integers, text and alphanumeric) from tab-delimited text files and reading from excel spreadsheets. I want to be sure my the values i put into variable are clean from any /s, /t, /n, etc on both the leading and tail end of my values. What is the best solution for this? Substitution function? </p>