I'm assigning a string (my name is xxxxxx ssddd) a shell variable(str)
when echo the variable.
echo $str
my name is xxxxxx ssddd
Why white spaces are not taken in to account?
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Henk Langeveld
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Jeevanantham
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How exactly do you assign? Wrapping the string in quotes should work. – Thilo Dec 15 '15 at 09:53
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It might have something to do with the "Internal Field Separator" character, which is defined in `$IFS`. [Read the KSH documentation](http://www.kornshell.com/doc/). – Some programmer dude Dec 15 '15 at 09:54
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i'm assigning it with the quotes only `str="my name is xxxxxx ssddd"` like this – Jeevanantham Dec 15 '15 at 09:54
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I think bash interpreter is replacing white spaces, tabs with single space. – Vikram Dattu Dec 15 '15 at 09:57
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`echo "$str"`, not `echo $str` – Charles Duffy Dec 15 '15 at 22:24
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@VikramDattu, not exactly -- bash is generating a list of arguments for `echo`, and that list of arguments puts `my`, `name`, `is`, etc. each as its own element. It's `echo` that puts a space between each of those elements. – Charles Duffy Dec 15 '15 at 22:26
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If I might suggest a reference: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/Practices#Quoting – Charles Duffy Dec 15 '15 at 22:28
1 Answers
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Quote your strings in order to preserve white space:
a="four spaces"
echo $a
four spaces
echo "$a"
four spaces
However, when assigning one variable to another, whitespace also is preserved:
a=$b
echo "$b"
four spaces
Henk Langeveld
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