Bash: Assign output of pipe to a variable

I am trying to get the output of a pipe into a variable. I tried the following things: echo foo | myvar=$($myvar is empty. I don’t want to do: myvar=$(echo foo) Because I don’t want to spawn a subshell. Any ideas? **Edit:** I don’t want to spawn a subshell because the command before the pipe needs to edit global variables, which it can’t do in a subshell. Can it? The echo thing is just for simplification. It’s more like: complex_function | myvar=$(