Shell Removing Tabs/Spaces

Question

I\'ve used a grep command with sed and cut filters that basically turns my output to something similar to this

    this line 1


    this line 2


    another li         


        

Answer 1

(whateverproducesthisoutput)|sed -E 's/^[[:space:]]+//'|grep -v '^$'

(depending on your sed, you can replace [[:space:]] with \s).