Bash - cut " " from end of variable

[iwinonturn]

I have a variable zamik, which is concatenated from a and b
So it looks something like:

a="|   "  
b="    ".
 "|          |                  |                         ".

I'd like to cut last empty spaces, so it would look like:

 "|          |                  |".

I tried many things, like:
zamik=${zamik#*|}
zamik=${zamik%|*}
zamik=${zamik%%\x20}
zamik=${zamik%"|"}

but none works...

[tpl]

have you tried "cut"?

cut -b -12 <text

supposing you want to retain 12 characters.

[iwinonturn]

I solved it using local variables (i was adding $a and $b in recursive calls).

I couldn't use cut because I didn'n know how many characters exactly I want to keep.

Thanks anyway.