Cocoa – Trim all leading whitespace from NSString

This creates an NSString category to do what you need. With this, you can call NSString *newString = [mystring stringByTrimmingLeadingWhitespace]; to get a copy minus leading whitespace. (Code is untested, may require some minor debugging.)

@interface NSString (trimLeadingWhitespace)
-(NSString*)stringByTrimmingLeadingWhitespace;
@end

@implementation NSString (trimLeadingWhitespace)
-(NSString*)stringByTrimmingLeadingWhitespace {
    NSInteger i = 0;

    while ((i < [self length])
           && [[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet] characterIsMember:[self characterAtIndex:i]]) {
        i++;
    }
    return [self substringFromIndex:i];
}
@end