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Using sed in bash to remove whitespace

Hi, I'm new to sed and need to be able to use it in a bash script to remove whitespace from some html code. I've got a variable called regionWholeLine in my script:

(because the forum automatically deletes them I have to represent whitepace with ....)

.................................................<strong>Asia-Pacific</strong><br />

so I used the following code:

regionWholeLine="`echo "$regionWholeLine" | sed -e :a -e 's/^[ .............. ]*<strong/<strong /'`"

However, it doesn't seem to work and I've no idea why, because elsewhere in my script I use similar code to do exactly the same thing:

titleWholeLine="`echo "$titleWholeLine" | sed -e :a -e 's/^[ ......... ]*<td class/<td class/'`"

works on:

.......................................................<td class="title">

Any ideas why I'm having problems?

Thanks,

~James~

If you use code tags
[ c o d e ]
.........
[ / c o d e ] (without the spaces ) the forum won't chop off leading blanks.

Here is a start:

Code:

tmp=`echo "$regionWholeLine" | sed 's/  / /g' | sed 's/^[ ]//' `

echo $tmp

How about this:

test.txt

Code:

    

    <hello>

      <dude>

Code:

# cat test.txt | sed 's/^[ ]*//'

<hello>

<dude>

#

Ah! I figured it out! Thanks for your replies, it helped me understand a little better about how sed works (I could only find very complicated documentation). It was all because I was using a space, instead of a tab inbetween the [ ] :)

Cheers,

~James~