How do you retain trailing newlines when storing command output in a variable?

Question

Is it possible to retain trailing newlines when storing the output of a command in a variable?

$ echo \"foo
\" # newline appears after foo
foo

$ MYVAR=\"$(echo          


        

Answer 1

You can add a sentinel to the end of the stream:

$ my_var=$'foo\n\n'
$ captured=$( echo -n "$my_var"; echo -n "x" )

which you then remove:

$ captured=${captured%x}
$ echo "$captured"