How to trim whitespace from a Bash variable?

Question

I have a shell script with this code:

var=`hg st -R \"$path\"`
if [ -n \"$var\" ]; then
    echo $var
fi

But the conditional code always ex

Answer 1

With Bash's extended pattern matching features enabled (shopt -s extglob), you can use this:

{trimmed##*( )}

to remove an arbitrary amount of leading spaces.