From: Andrew Johnson <ajohnson@...>
Date: 2004-10-03T17:50:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Feature Request:  Truly Indented Here-Docs

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 12:55:51 +0900, James Edward Gray II
<james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
[snip]
 
> It would make a lot more sense to me if lines of a here-doc were 
> stripped of leading whitespace equal to the indention of the end tag.  
> Is there any reason this wasn't done, or isn't practical?

I usually give my here-docs a block-like structure:

      str = <<-DOC
        line 1
        line 2
      DOC

so stripping leading spaces equal to indentation of the terminator-tag
wouldn't be my preference. I've found the following useful for stripping
common leading space:

    class String
      def dedent
        a = $1 if match(/\A(\s*)(.*\n)(?:\1.*\n|\n)*\z/)
        gsub(/^#{a}/, '')
      end
    end

# then later:

      puts <<-DOC.dedent
        * item 1
          * item 1.2
        * item 2
          * item 2.1
      DOC

andrew