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

Assignments ignore leading and trailing whitespace and as such can be used to trim:

$ var=`echo '   hello'`; echo $var
hello