not too sure about ash but you get less chars with:

 print "${new% }"

another way showing off some aspects of modern shells but still a bit longish...


% stephan@labaule (/home/stephan) %
% cat rev.sh
#!/bin/ksh93

function rev
{
  nameref s=$1; typeset a=( $s ); integer n=${#a[*]} i; s=; n=n-1
  for i in {$n..0}; do s+="${a[i]} "; done; s=${s%?}
}


s="   one  two three   four "
rev s
print "[$s]"

% stephan@labaule (/home/stephan) %
% ksh93 rev.sh
[four three two one]

[download]
enjoy ;) --steph

In reply to Re^2: Five Ways to Reverse a String of Words (C#, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Haskell) by sgt
in thread Five Ways to Reverse a String of Words (C#, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Haskell) by eyepopslikeamosquito

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.