read output of process into a variable

[Stefan Palme]

Hi,
don't know if this is the right newsgroup, but it's the only one
I can find with "bash" in its name :-)

I want to do something like this:

  result=""
  /usr/bin/output_generator | while read line; do
    extracteddata=`echo "$line" | sed -e 's/X/Y/'`
    result="$result $extracteddata"
  done
  /usr/bin/another_tool "$result"

In the last line is "result" as empty as at the start of the
whole thing - I guess because the inner "while" loop is executed
in a subshell, so that changing the value of "result" in this
loop does not affect the "outer result".

How can I solve this? I have some very ugly solutions, but
I guess there must be something "nice" :-)

(using bash-3.2.17(1)-release)

Thanks and regards
-stefan-