From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2008-10-20T08:38:57+09:00
Subject: Re: a new quotation operator to automatically unindent %q and %Q

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:38:05 -0500, Suraj Kurapati wrote:

> 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.

Use the facets gem's String#margin instead?

--Ken

-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/