Bashscripts.org

Hi.

I want to apend the string "<br>" to each line of a file and echo it to stdout. Many of the lines have leading spaces which I want to preserve in the ouptut. Here was my attempt...

cat filename | while read a; do echo $a \<br\>; done

HOWEVER, the leading spaces are stripped from any lines that have them. When I read more about the "read" command it seems to make sense because as I understand it read is tokenizing the words in the lines based on white space it finds in them, thus discarding all white space.

So, how can I accomplish this preserving leading spaces?

Thanks!

First of all, since you're doing html, are you trying to keep indenting in the source or do you want the spaces to be shown on the page?

I'll write the solution for both,
If you just want it to be for source indenting then just encase your echo in quotation


if you want the spaces to be there for the output of a browser you need to do convert the spaces to html entities. This because of html's way of interpret whitespaces.


Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson