Escript Framework - lTrim & rTrim

I want to make sure I am making regular contributions to our open source eScript framework function library, so today's theme will be to continue with some tools for the string object not included in the standard escript string library. Last time I talked about lPad and rPad, so let's continue with their inverse, lTrim and rTrim. These are pretty basic concepts, present in VB and SQL, but the idea is simply to remove all spaces from either the front or back of a string. Metalink actually provides a couple of approaches to this, on based on regular expressions from Siebel 7.5 and earlier (before the replace function),

String.prototype.lTrim = function() {
var aReturn = this.split(/^\s*/);
return(aReturn.join(""));
}
String.prototype.rTrim = function() {
var aReturn = this.split(/\s*$/);
return(aReturn.join(""));
}

And here is a looping approach:

String.prototype.rTrim = function() {
var iCount = 0;
var iLength = this.length;
while ((iCount<iLength)&&(this.substring(iLength-iCount-1, iLength-iCount)==" ")) iCount++;
return(this.substring(0, iLength - iCount));
}
String.prototype.lTrim = function() {
var iCount = 0;
var iLength = this.length;
while ((iCount<iLength)&&(this.substring(iCount, iCount+1)==" ")) iCount++;
return(this.substring(iCount, iLength));
}

But if you are using Siebel 7.5 or later, using the replace function with regular expressions that find end of string anchored and beginning of string anchored white space, respectively, should be the best approach:

String.prototype.rTrim = function() {
//Use: String.rTrim()
//Returns string trimmed of any space characters at the end of it
return(this.replace(/\s*$/, ""));
}
String.prototype.lTrim = function() {
//Use: String.lTrim()
//Returns string trimmed of any space characters at the beginning of it
return(this.replace(/^\s*/, ""));
}