The Surprising Working of TrimEnd

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes

Words: 397

A couple of days ago, I was running some unit tests across a piece of PowerShell code for work and a test was failing where I didn’t expect it to.

After realising that the issue was with the workings of TrimEnd and my thoughts on how TrimEnd works (versus how it actually works), I wondered if it was just me being a bit stupid.

So I put a poll up on Twitter, and I’m not alone! 60% of the people answering the poll had the wrong idea as well.

Let’s have some code to show what we mean.

'Shanes_sqlserver'

Incorrect Ideas

The vast majority of code that I have seen out in the wild has strings as the inner portion of TrimEnd

'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('sqlserver')

The code works how I thought that it would, removing the “sqlserver” portion of the string at the end. Now, let’s try it again and remove the underscore as well.

'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('_sqlserver')

See! Where has my “s” and “e” gone?!

Let’s look at the overload definitions for TrimEnd by running the code without the brackets after the method.

'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd

No overload definition takes a string; they either take a char or an array of chars. Is that what’s happening here?

# Takes an array of chars
'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('_', 's', 'q', 'l', 'e', 'r', 'v')

# Turns a string into an array of chars
'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('_sqlerv')

# Order doesn't matter either
'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('vrelqs_')

A New Way of Thinking

So TrimEnd takes the characters that we provide inside the method and removes them from the end until it reaches the first non-matching character.

This example explains why our first example, with TrimEnd('sqlserver'), removes everything up to the underscore.

'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('sqlserver')
# -----^ First non-matching character (_)

However, when we include the underscore, the first non-matching character shuffles back.

'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('_sqlserver') 
# --^ First non-matching character (n)

Initial Problem

Now that we have a new understanding of how TrimEnd works, how can we remove the “_sqlserver” part of the string?

Split it in two.

'Shanes_sqlserver'.TrimEnd('sqlserver').TrimEnd('_')
# -----^  First non-matching character (_)
# ----^  First non-matching character after first TrimEnd (s)

This rewrite works for us since we have a defined character that acts as a stop-gap. If that stop-gap isn’t possible, then -replace may be our best option.

'Shanes_sqlserver' -replace '_sqlserver'

Always good to get a better understanding of PowerShell. If my tests catch more of these misunderstandings that I can learn from, then I’m OK with that!