Question

Trying to format a mutliline string in Ruby

heredoc and %q{ } have the issue that they include whitespace used for formatting the code.

s = %q{Foo
         Bar
         Baz}
puts s

Incorrectly outputs the following:

Foo
          Bar
          Baz   

The following works, but is a bit ugly with the \ characters.

s = "Foo\n" \
    "  Bar\n" \
    "  Baz"
puts s

The following works in python:

s = ("Foo\n"
     "  Bar\n"
     "  Baz")
print s

Is there an equivalent in Ruby?

Answer 1

A trick I stole from The Ruby Way:

class String
  def heredoc(prefix='|')
    gsub /^\s*#{Regexp.quote(prefix)}/m, ''
  end
end

s = <<-END.heredoc
    |Foo
    |  Bar
    |  Baz
    END