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Strip Whitespace From Bash Variable

09.29.2009
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        Strip (AKA "trim") the whitespace from the beginning and end of a variable in Bash.


# Strip the whitespace from the beginning and end.
STRING_VAR=`expr "$STRING_VAR" : '[[:space:]]*\(.*\)[[:space:]]*$'`


<b>Sources</b>
From <a href="http://booklistgensh.peterknowles.com">Peter Knowles's</a> "booklistgen.sh" script for converting files to Sony Librie format.
<a href="http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/advanced_bash_scripting_guide/moreadv.html">Original forum post</a>

Comments

Snippets Manager replied on Sat, 2009/05/09 - 2:35am

this only strips spaces, not all whitespace: This has worked for me: $stripped_version=`echo $unstripped_version| awk '{gsub(/^ +| +$/,"")}1'`
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