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~~Simplest way of stripping leading/trailing whitespace from standard input~~

Simplest way of stripping leading/trailing whitespace from file or program output

~~What is the simplest shell idiom for stripping leading and trailing whitespace from standard output? Ideally I am looking for the equivalent of `trim` or `strip` methods in some languages.~~
There is potentially a confusion here about whether I'm asking about trimming only the first and last lines, or if every line should individually be trimmed. An ideal solution would assume the first, but make the second a CLI switch.

What is the simplest shell idiom for stripping leading and trailing whitespace from a file or program output? Ideally I am looking for the equivalent of `trim` or `strip` methods in some languages.
The ideal solution should
* skip empty lines at the beginning and end of the file/stream
* provide an option to also strip leading and trailing whitespace from all non-empty lines

file newlines

text-processing