title: Ignorance of spaces by cut command
body: <p>The question is:  Display the and character from each line of text. </p>
  
  <p>This was my code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>while read line
  do
      a=`echo $line | cut -c 2`
      b=`echo $line | cut -c 7`
  
      echo -n $a
      echo $b
  done
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem is that when the first character is a space, it does not print the space. For example,</p>
  
  <pre><code>Input:
  A big elephant
  
  Expected output:
   e
  
  My output:
  e
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can this be fixed?</p>