Can anyone please tell me how to strip the white spaces from a character vector?

for example:

a$tic[1:10]

[1] "AIR " "ABCB " "ABXA " "ACMR " "ADCT " "ADEX "
[7] "ABM " "AFCE " "AG " "ATG "
 Can anyone please tell me how to strip the white spaces from a$tic?
 Thanks,
 Roger

Roger, 

See the next to last set of examples in ?sub.

a <- c("ABM ", "AFCE ", "AG ", "ATG ")
a

[1] "ABM "  "AFCE " "AG "   "ATG "

a.new <- sub(' +$', '', a)
a.new

[1] "ABM"  "AFCE" "AG"   "ATG"


Also, if this data was generated using read.table() or one of it's
variants, note the use of the 'strip.white' argument in ?read.table.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz