This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Andrew Johnson. Original Post: Undenting Strings Feed Title: Simple things ... Feed URL: http://www.siaris.net/index.cgi/index.rss Feed Description: On programming, problem solving, and communication. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Andrew Johnson Latest Posts From Simple things ...

One extremely nice feature about Ruby is that here-doc terminators may be indented (if the terminator specification begins with a hyphen). This means it is not necessary to either put here-docs at the left margin, or to quote some hardcoded amount of whitespace in the terminator specification (as in Perl). Here-docs can make nice easy templates for simple code generation — but what about whitespace sensitivity of the generated code (such as RDoc markup)?

The following is a simple regex to strip common leading spaces from a multi-line string (added as a method to the String class in this example):

  class String
    def undent
      a = $1 if match(/\A(\s+)(.*\n)(?:\1.*\n)*\z/)
      gsub(/^#{a}/,'')
    end
    alias :dedent :undent
  end

And now, if you have some method that returns a here-doc, you can simply dedent it:

  class SomeTemplate
    def some_meth(foo,bar)
      <<-STOP.dedent
        * #{foo} list item
          * sublist with #{bar} item
      STOP
    end
  end

  x = SomeTemplate.new
  puts x.some_meth('first', 'second')
  __END__

  output:

  * first list item
    * sublist with second item

Not rocket science, but I find it handy to have a dedent method lying around for just such uses.