Right now this takes a bunch of words separated by a comma and spits them up by the comma. My only issue is that the words after the comma have leading spaces. How would I remove leading and trailing spaces in strings?
for reqSkill in string.gmatch(skillData[6], '([^,]+)') do print(reqSkill) -- table.insert(PreReqSkills, reqSkill) end
Is there a built in function for this?
There's no built-in trim function, but there are multiple implementations on this page of the Lua-users Wiki.
At the bottom, a test shows that implementation number 5 seems to be favorable from a performance standpoint. (Not that this really matters in your case. It just gives us a reason to choose an implementation from the many on that page.)
function trim(s) return s:match'^%s*(.*%S)' or '' end