How can I trim leading and trailing white space?

As of R 3.2.0 a new function was introduced for removing leading/trailing white spaces:

trimws()

See: Remove Leading/Trailing Whitespace

Probably the best way is to handle the trailing white spaces when you read your data file. If you use read.csv or read.table you can set the parameterstrip.white=TRUE.

If you want to clean strings afterwards you could use one of these functions:

# Returns string without leading white space
trim.leading <- function (x)  sub("^\\s+", "", x)

# Returns string without trailing white space
trim.trailing <- function (x) sub("\\s+$", "", x)

# Returns string without leading or trailing white space
trim <- function (x) gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", x)

To use one of these functions on myDummy$country:

 myDummy$country <- trim(myDummy$country)

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To 'show' the white space you could use:

 paste(myDummy$country)

which will show you the strings surrounded by quotation marks (") making white spaces easier to spot.