Leading spaces of variable removed

Shell Programming and Scripting
1 
#!/bin/bash

TESTVAR="     5spaces"
echo $TESTVAR

hostame:~# ./test.sh
5spaces

The leading spaces from my variable are removed when the content is echo'd. I am trying to make some tabular data.

`echo -e` also fails.

Any suggestions?

2 
echo "$TESTVAR"

...the variable put inside double-quotes will preserve spaces

3

Works great. Thanks!