How do I remove leading whitespace chars from Ruby HEREDOC?

Question

I\'m having a problem with a Ruby heredoc i\'m trying to make. It\'s returning the leading whitespace from each line even though i\'m including the - operator, which is supp

Answer 1

Like the original poster, I too discovered the <<-HEREDOC syntax and was pretty damn disappointed that it didn't behave as I thought it should behave.

But instead of littering my code with gsub-s I extended the String class:

class String
  # Removes beginning-whitespace from each line of a string.
  # But only as many whitespace as the first line has.
  #
  # Ment to be used with heredoc strings like so:
  #
  # text = <<-EOS.unindent
  #   This line has no indentation
  #     This line has 2 spaces of indentation
  #   This line is also not indented
  # EOS
  #
  def unindent
    lines = []
    each_line {|ln| lines << ln }

    first_line_ws = lines[0].match(/^\s+/)[0]
    re = Regexp.new('^\s{0,' + first_line_ws.length.to_s + '}')

    lines.collect {|line| line.sub(re, "") }.join
  end
end