Question

I may be in the minority here, but I very much enjoy Perl’s formats. I especially like being able to wrap a long piece of text within a column ("~~ ^<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<" type stuff). Are there any other programming languages that have similar features, or libraries that implement similar features? I am especially interested in any libraries that implement something similar for Ruby, but I’m also curious about any other options.

Answer 1

FormatR provides Perl-like formats for Ruby.

Here is an example from the documentation:

require 'formatr' include FormatR  top_ex = <<DOT    Piggy Locations for @<< @#, @###                      month, day, year  Number: location              toe size ------------------------------------------- DOT  ex = <<TOD @)      @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<       @#.## num,    location,             toe_size TOD  body_fmt = Format.new (top_ex, ex)  body_fmt.setPageLength(10) num = 1  month = 'Sep' day = 18 year = 2001 ['Market', 'Home', 'Eating Roast Beef', 'Having None', 'On the way home'].each {|location|     toe_size = (num * 3.5)     body_fmt.printFormat(binding)     num += 1 } 

Which produces:

   Piggy Locations for Sep 18, 2001  Number: location              toe size ------------------------------------------- 1)      Market                   3.50 2)      Home                     7.00 3)      Eating Roast Beef       10.50 4)      Having None             14.00 5)      On the way home         17.50