Sure, here's an explanation of how to remove leading and trailing whitespaces from a string in Lua:
In Lua, you can use the string.gsub() function along with a pattern to replace any leading or trailing whitespace characters with an empty string. Here's an example:
str = " Hello, world! "
cleanStr = string.gsub(str, "^%s*(.-)%s*$", "%1")
print(cleanStr) -- Output: "Hello, world!"
This code creates a string str that has leading and trailing whitespace characters. It then uses string.gsub() with a pattern that matches any leading or trailing whitespace characters (denoted by %s*) and captures the rest of the string (denoted by (.-)). The %1 in the replacement part of the function represents the captured string, effectively cutting off any leading or trailing whitespace characters.
The output of cleanStr shows that the code successfully removed the leading and trailing whitespace characters from the original string.