From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2008-10-20T11:33:56+09:00
Subject: Re: a new quotation operator to automatically unindent %q and %Q



On Oct 19, 5:38 pm, Suraj Kurapati <s...@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?

Hi--

This is not an uncommon request. Consider:

  http://rcrchive.net/rcrs/2

Long long ago I proposed %l and %L:

         %l{
           |This block of text will,
           |
           | unfortunately,
           |
           |contain the indentation of
           |
           |  the
           |     surrounding
           |                 code!
           |
           |Unless we manually remove it,
           |as shown by the gsub() below:
           }

But matz does not seem to see merit in any of this. I'm not sure why.

T.