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

I've always done it with sed

  var=`hg st -R "$path" | sed -e 's/  *$//'`

If there is a more elegant solution, I hope somebody posts it.