Use Bash to read line by line and keep space

Question

When I use \"cat test.file\", it will show

1
 2
  3
   4

When I use the Bash file,

cat test.file |
while read data
do
    e         


        

Answer 1

Maybe IFS is the key point as others said. You need to add only IFS= between while and read.

cat test.file | 
while IFS= read data 
 do echo "$data"
 done

and do not forget quotations of $data, else echo will trim the spaces.

But as Joshua Davies mentioned, you would prefer to use the predefined variable $REPLY.