I have a question. Is this the right approach? I agree (mostly) with leading and trailing whitespace, but what about whitespace in the middle? Is "I am a pass" a legitimate password? For that matter, what about " I am a pass "? Two distinct questions:

• should we be trimming in the middle?
• should we be trimming at all?

Would it make more sense to include the password in single quotes, so that they get passed as a single arg?

What you have mentioned is something I thought of initially and I went with the approach
where "I am a pass" is kept the same and " I am a pass " was converted to "I am a pass"
but that did not work when we enter this in .env file

For eg: MYSQL_PASS= I am a pass

The reason I went with trimming the white space in between the password is to avoid the issue when read from .env file like the ones mentioned below

MYSQL_PASS=  mysqlPassW0rd
MYSQL_PASS=  mysql PassW0rd
MYSQL_PASS=  mysql Pass    W0rd   
MYSQL_PASS=mysqlPassW0rd   

I can see how trimming whitespace at beginning and end would be right (again, I am not 100% sure of this), but if someone put whitespace in the middle, it is highly likely they intended to. I wouldn't want us to be in a place of second-guessing what they chose to do.

Any reason we cannot just go to quotes and not need to trim at all?