Unrecognized command: remove leading & trailing blanks

[Meredith Dixon]

I'm trying to remove leading and trailing blanks for a string variable and have tried all of these:

strtrim(m_id)
strrtrim(m_id)
trim("m_id")
ltrim(m_id)
ltrim(" m_id")
ltrim( m_id)

However, each time, stata (version 14) says that the command is unrecognized. These are commands that I've been told by colleagues to use and that many of the online help is telling me to use. Perhaps there are new versions of those in version 14 but I don't know what they are nor do I see a way to do this in the dropdown menu. How do people removing leading and trailing blanks in stata?
Thanks!

[Nick Cox]

See concurrent thread http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...tions-in-stata

These are functions, not commands, and will not work except as called within a command.