From: Suraj Kurapati <snk@...>
Date: 2008-10-20T06:38:05+09:00
Subject: a new quotation operator to automatically unindent %q and %Q

Hello everyone,

Many times I have faced the situation of embedding multi-line strings in
my programs while wanting to preserve the indentation of the surrounding
code:

  module Foo
    class Bar
      def to_s
        %q{
          This block of text will,

            unfortunately,

          contain the indentation of

            the
                surrounding
                            code!

          Unless we manually remove it,
          as shown by the gsub() below:

        }.gsub(/^          /, '')
      end
    end
  end

The same problem occurs for "here documents" as well.  We are forced to
manually remove the indentation.

I would like to propose a new set of string quotation operators %s and
%S which behave just like %q and %Q respectively, except that they are
automatically unindented by the Ruby interpreter using the first line of
non-whitespace text:

  amount_to_unindent = input_string[/\A(?:\r?\n)+([ \t]+)(?=\S)/, 1]
  input_string.gsub! /^#{amount_to_unindent}/, ''

What do you think?

Thanks for your consideration.
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