From: Michael Guterl <mguterl@...>
Date: 2008-10-20T09:09:40+09:00
Subject: Re: a new quotation operator to automatically unindent %q and %Q

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 5:38 PM, Suraj Kurapati <snk@gna.org> 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?
>

%s is already in use for symbols.