From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2010-03-28T04:23:43+09:00
Subject: Re: remove overall indentation preserving reletive indentation

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On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Jesse B. <jessebos@aol.com> wrote:

> I am trying to find a solution to remove the overall indentation of a
> block of text while preserving the relative indentation of each line,
> for example
>
>  line 1
>    line 2
>
> (2 spaces then 4 spaces)
> should become
>
> line 1
>  line 2
>
> (0 spaces then two spaces)
>
> so that the two space between lines relative indentation is preserved,
> yet the first two spaces overall indentation goes away.
>
> what I have tried so far is string .strip, which seems to remove all
> leading space of the first line only
>
> content =
> "  line 1
>    line2"
> output = content.strip
> print output
>
> produces
>
> line 1
>    line 2
>
> 0 spaces then 4.
>
> whereas Im going for
>
> a result of 0 then 2 from starting with 2 then 4.
>
> I assume the solution would probably involve getting the number of
> spaces for the first line and removing that number of spaces from each
> line in the block?
>
> thanks in advance for your help.
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>

Perhaps

def relative_indented(str)
  leading_whitespace = str[/\A\s*/]
  str.gsub /^#{leading_whitespace}/ , String.new
end


puts relative_indented <<END_OF_TEXT
  Two Spaces
    Four Spaces
      Six Spaces
    Four Spaces
  Two Spaces
END_OF_TEXT

A few things, though. Everything is relative to your initial indenting, so
if you have a line later with less indenting, then it will just go to zero
(will not be relative, because it would need negative indenting). You could
get around this by checking each line to find the one with the largest
indenting, and make them relative to that, whereas I have just checked it
against the first line in the string. Also, mixing spaces with tabs will
mess it up, unless you are consistent with your use across every line.

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