Shell Script: How to trim spaces from a bash variable

Question

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How to trim whitespace from bash variable?

I have searched and attempted a number of solutions but nothing seems to work for me...

I have a shell variable which is causing issues due to leading and trailing spaces. how can we get rid of all the spaces in a single line using shell script?

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 13 '17 at 10:34

19

I can think of two options:

variable="  gfgergj lkjgrg  "
echo $variable | sed 's,^ *,,; s, *$,,'

or else

nospaces=${variable## } # remove leading spaces
nospaces=${variable%% } # remove trailing spaces

edited Jul 13 '17 at 10:34

Gene Pavlovsky

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answered Aug 03 '12 at 07:50

jpmuc

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4

`nospaces=${variable// }` actually removes leading and trailing spaces in my Bash – tzelleke Aug 03 '12 at 09:01
8

nospaces=${variable// } removes all spaces – blue01 Jan 05 '14 at 21:19
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nospaces=${variable// } removes all spaces – gammay Apr 12 '16 at 09:25
The second option removes at most one space. This [method](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7486606/4377192) is rather long, only applies to bash, but is quite efficient and can also take care of tabs, newlines etc. – Gene Pavlovsky Jul 12 '17 at 16:00

Kent · Answer 2 · 2012-08-03T13:26:48.823

1

there are so many ways to achieve that, awk oneliner:

kent$  echo "    foo  -  -  -  bar   "|awk '{sub(/^ */,"",$0);sub(/ *$/,"",$0)}1'
foo  -  -  -  bar

edited Aug 03 '12 at 13:26

answered Aug 03 '12 at 07:54

Kent

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Shell Script: How to trim spaces from a bash variable

2 Answers2