One can use one of the string methods find_last_not_of and find_first_not_of. What these methods do is that they return the index of the string where the character in that index does NOT match what you are looking for.
For example:
string str = " TEST STRING "; //there is a space in the beginning and end
cout << str.find_first_not_of(" ") << endl; //this line will return a 1, because thats the first thats not of a " To get rid of the leading and trailing spaces in that string, we can do this:
str = str.substr(str.find_first_not_of(" ")); //str will now be assigned "TEST STRING ", note that there is still a space at the end
str = str.substr(0, str.find_last_not_of(" ") + 1) //now the trailing space is removed. &nbsp;a 1 is added because without it, we would get "TEST STRIN" instead. the 1 ensures that only the space is removed