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

Strip one leading and one trailing space

trim()
{
    local trimmed="$1"

    # Strip leading space.
    trimmed="${trimmed## }"
    # Strip trailing space.
    trimmed="${trimmed%% }"

    echo "$trimmed"
}

For example:

test1="$(trim " one leading")"
test2="$(trim "one trailing ")"
test3="$(trim " one leading and one trailing ")"
echo "'$test1', '$test2', '$test3'"

Output:

'one leading', 'one trailing', 'one leading and one trailing'

Strip all leading and trailing spaces

trim()
{
    local trimmed="$1"

    # Strip leading spaces.
    while [[ $trimmed == ' '* ]]; do
       trimmed="${trimmed## }"
    done
    # Strip trailing spaces.
    while [[ $trimmed == *' ' ]]; do
        trimmed="${trimmed%% }"
    done

    echo "$trimmed"
}

For example:

test4="$(trim "  two leading")"
test5="$(trim "two trailing  ")"
test6="$(trim "  two leading and two trailing  ")"
echo "'$test4', '$test5', '$test6'"

Output:

'two leading', 'two trailing', 'two leading and two trailing'

Answer 2

This worked for me:

text="   trim my edges    "

trimmed=$text
trimmed=${trimmed##+( )} #Remove longest matching series of spaces from the front
trimmed=${trimmed%%+( )} #Remove longest matching series of spaces from the back

echo "<$trimmed>" #Adding angle braces just to make it easier to confirm that all spaces are removed

#Result
<trim my edges>

To put that on fewer lines for the same result:

text="    trim my edges    "
trimmed=${${text##+( )}%%+( )}

Answer 3

# Strip leading and trailing white space (new line inclusive).
trim(){
    [[ "$1" =~ [^[:space:]](.*[^[:space:]])? ]]
    printf "%s" "$BASH_REMATCH"
}

OR

# Strip leading white space (new line inclusive).
ltrim(){
    [[ "$1" =~ [^[:space:]].* ]]
    printf "%s" "$BASH_REMATCH"
}

# Strip trailing white space (new line inclusive).
rtrim(){
    [[ "$1" =~ .*[^[:space:]] ]]
    printf "%s" "$BASH_REMATCH"
}

# Strip leading and trailing white space (new line inclusive).
trim(){
    printf "%s" "$(rtrim "$(ltrim "$1")")"
}

OR

# Strip leading and trailing specified characters.  ex: str=$(trim "$str" $'\n a')
trim(){
    if [ "$2" ]; then
        trim_chrs="$2"
    else
        trim_chrs="[:space:]"
    fi

    [[ "$1" =~ ^["$trim_chrs"]*(.*[^"$trim_chrs"])["$trim_chrs"]*$ ]]
    printf "%s" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
}

OR

# Strip leading specified characters.  ex: str=$(ltrim "$str" $'\n a')
ltrim(){
    if [ "$2" ]; then
        trim_chrs="$2"
    else
        trim_chrs="[:space:]"
    fi

    [[ "$1" =~ ^["$trim_chrs"]*(.*[^"$trim_chrs"]) ]]
    printf "%s" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
}

# Strip trailing specified characters.  ex: str=$(rtrim "$str" $'\n a')
rtrim(){
    if [ "$2" ]; then
        trim_chrs="$2"
    else
        trim_chrs="[:space:]"
    fi

    [[ "$1" =~ ^(.*[^"$trim_chrs"])["$trim_chrs"]*$ ]]
    printf "%s" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
}

# Strip leading and trailing specified characters.  ex: str=$(trim "$str" $'\n a')
trim(){
    printf "%s" "$(rtrim "$(ltrim "$1" "$2")" "$2")"
}

OR

Building upon moskit's expr soulution...

# Strip leading and trailing white space (new line inclusive).
trim(){
    printf "%s" "`expr "$1" : "^[[:space:]]*\(.*[^[:space:]]\)[[:space:]]*$"`"
}

OR

# Strip leading white space (new line inclusive).
ltrim(){
    printf "%s" "`expr "$1" : "^[[:space:]]*\(.*[^[:space:]]\)"`"
}

# Strip trailing white space (new line inclusive).
rtrim(){
    printf "%s" "`expr "$1" : "^\(.*[^[:space:]]\)[[:space:]]*$"`"
}

# Strip leading and trailing white space (new line inclusive).
trim(){
    printf "%s" "$(rtrim "$(ltrim "$1")")"
}

Answer 4

You can trim simply with echo:

foo=" qsdqsd qsdqs q qs   "

# Not trimmed
echo \'$foo\'

# Trim
foo=`echo $foo`

# Trimmed
echo \'$foo\'

Answer 5

Bash has a feature called parameter expansion, which, among other things, allows string replacement based on so-called patterns (patterns resemble regular expressions, but there are fundamental differences and limitations). [flussence's original line: Bash has regular expressions, but they're well-hidden:]

The following demonstrates how to remove all white space (even from the interior) from a variable value.

$ var='abc def'
$ echo "$var"
abc def
# Note: flussence's original expression was "${var/ /}", which only replaced the *first* space char., wherever it appeared.
$ echo -n "${var//[[:space:]]/}"
abcdef

Answer 6

There is a solution which only uses Bash built-ins called wildcards:

var="    abc    "
# remove leading whitespace characters
var="${var#"${var%%[![:space:]]*}"}"
# remove trailing whitespace characters
var="${var%"${var##*[![:space:]]}"}"   
printf '%s' "===$var==="

Here's the same wrapped in a function:

trim() {
    local var="$*"
    # remove leading whitespace characters
    var="${var#"${var%%[![:space:]]*}"}"
    # remove trailing whitespace characters
    var="${var%"${var##*[![:space:]]}"}"   
    printf '%s' "$var"
}

You pass the string to be trimmed in quoted form. e.g.:

trim "   abc   "

A nice thing about this solution is that it will work with any POSIX-compliant shell.

Reference

• Remove leading & trailing whitespace from a Bash variable (original source)