Front month October finished up $2.5 at $237.1 a tonne in volume of 2,120 lots, having traded in a range between $234 and $237.5.
December ended up $1.2 at $243.8 in volume of 1,316 lots.
"The market has been inching up today, and it looks like the period of consolidation at the lower levels of the recent range is coming to an end," one operator said.
Now that funds had liquidated excess longs to what might be a "core" level, they could be enticed into buying again soon, particularly if there was fresh trade buying, dealers said. Positive sentiment was helped slightly by news that the state-owned Ethiopian Sugar Industries Support Share Company said on Friday it had tendered for and bought 30,000 tonnes of white sugar to cover a domestic shortage.
Earlier in the Liffe session, the market was mixed with activity dominated by rolling out of the October contract into December, traders said. On the fundamentals side, 40 days of dry weather allowed Brazil's key center-south sugarcane harvest to regain some ground lost earlier due to rain, the main cane industry union, Unica, said in Sao Paulo on Thursday.