In a fish shell function how to pipe stdin to a variable?

Question

Here's what I got:

function stdin2var
    set a (cat -)
    echo $a
end

First example:

$ echo 'some text' | stdin2var
# should output "some text"

Second example:

$ echo some text\nsome more text | stdin2var
# should output: "some text
some more text"

Any tips?

Answer 1

In fish shell (and others), you want read:

echo 'some text' | read varname

Answer 2

Following up on @ridiculous_fish's answer, use a while loop to consume all input:

function stdin2var
    set -l a
    while read line
        set a $a $line
    end
    # $a is a *list*, so use printf to output it exactly.
    echo (count $a)
    printf "%s\n"  $a
end

So you get

$ echo foo bar | stdin2var
1
foo bar

$ seq 10 | stdin2var
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10