How to preserve leading spaces whern reading from a here-document with read?

Question

When using the following

read -r -d '' VAR <<EOF
  first line
  second line
EOF
echo "$VAR"

the leading spaces in the first line are trimmed:

first line
  second line

How can I echo the leading spaces in the first line and get the following?

  first line
  second line

Please note that this is a simplified example and that I need to use here document!

Answer 1

When your read into a variable you specify as a parameter, the leading and ending characters in IFS are considered delimiters and thus are removed.

First solution: empty IFS temporarily

IFS= read -r -d '' VAR <<EOF
  first line
  second line
EOF
printf '%s\n' "$VAR"

Second solution (non-portable): don't specify a variable and Bash will use the default variable REPLY

read -r -d '' <<EOF
  first line
  second line
EOF
printf '%s\n' "$REPLY"