Stripper is a Ruby on Rails plugin that removes leading and trailing blanks from attribute values in your models.

Leading and trailing spaces on attribute values can be a problem. They’re almost never wanted nor intended. In fact, Oracle actually treats empty strings as NULL. That’s not to say we necessarily think that the database should be messing with our data mind you but it does show that at least someone agrees with us.

Here’s an example of what happens when the plugin is installed:

$ ./script/console 
Loading development environment (Rails 2.2.2)
Welcome to interactive ruby!
irb --> u = User.new

irb --> u.name = "    Simon Harris   "
irb --> u.name
    ==> "Simon Harris"

irb --> u.name = "                   "
irb --> u.name
    ==> nil

You have two choices for installation. The first uses a gem (recommended):

config.gem "harukizaemon-stripper", :lib => "stripper", :source => "http://gems.github.com"

Or you can use the Rails plugin

$ ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/harukizaemon/stripper.git

This plugin is copyright 2009 Simon Harris and is released under the MIT license.