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Triming spaces for any variable

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# 1  
Old 09-23-2008
Hammer & Screwdriver Triming spaces for any variable
Hi,

I want to trim the spaces on left side of the variable value. For eg: if it is 4 spaces followed by value, All the spaces on the left should be supressed.

Easy but want it quickly.

Regards,
Shiv@jad
# 2  
Old 09-23-2008
Code:
$ echo "    something  here"|sed 's/^[ \t]*//'

 
OutPut
something  here

# 3  
Old 09-23-2008
Is there any direct function like trim?
# 4  
Old 09-23-2008
Not really. You could come up with a clever ${var#something} substitution but it would be rather more complex.

Code:
echo "${var#${var%?${var#*[! 	]}}}"

There's a space and a tab between [! and ].

If it is safe to not quote the variable, then simply using it without quotes will discard leading and trailing whitespace, and compress any internal whitespace.
Last edited by era; 09-23-2008 at 09:43 AM.. Reason: Use variable unquoted?
# 5  
Old 09-23-2008
echo $a | tr -s "^ "
# 6  
Old 09-23-2008
That only worked because you forgot to properly quote "$a" (at least it doesn't work here; tr does not look at context, and does not understand ^ to mean beginning of line; tr version from GNU coreutils 6.10).
# 7  
Old 09-23-2008
if you have Python, here's an alternative
Code:
echo "    something  here" |python -c "print raw_input().strip()"

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