Question

In PHP, the following would allow me to create a string without having to escape quotes..

$string = <<<EOD

',. whatever <"",'

EOD;

echo $string;

Is there anything similar to it in Ruby/Rails?

Answer 1

Ruby heredocs are pretty much the same, with minor changes, and they come in 2 flavours:

1) End-of-heredoc must be at the start a line:

string = <<EOD

  ',. whatever <"",'

EOD

puts string

2) End-of-heredoc may be preceeded by whitespace:

string = <<-EOD

  ',. whatever <"",'

       EOD

puts string