Ruby: Can I write multi-line string with no concatenation?

Question

Is there a way to make this look a little better?

conn.exec \'select attr1, attr2, attr3, attr4, attr5, attr6, attr7 \' +
          \'from table1, table2, ta         


        

Answer 1

There are multiple syntaxes for multi-line strings as you've already read. My favorite is Perl-style:

conn.exec %q{select attr1, attr2, attr3, attr4, attr5, attr6, attr7
      from table1, table2, table3, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
      where etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc}

The multi-line string starts with %q, followed by a {, [ or (, and then terminated by the corresponding reversed character. %q does not allow interpolation; %Q does so you can write things like this:

conn.exec %Q{select attr1, attr2, attr3, attr4, attr5, attr6, attr7
      from #{table_names},
      where etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc}

I actually have no idea how these kinds of multi-line strings are called so let's just call them Perl multilines.

Note however that whether you use Perl multilines or heredocs as Mark and Peter have suggested, you'll end up with potentially unnecessary whitespaces. Both in my examples and their examples, the "from" and "where" lines contain leading whitespaces because of their indentation in the code. If this whitespace is not desired then you must use concatenated strings as you are doing now.