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

another easy to remember option is to use unindent gem

require 'unindent'

p <<-end.unindent
    hello
      world
  end
# => "hello\n  world\n"  

Answer 2

The <<- form of heredoc only ignores leading whitespace for the end delimiter.

With Ruby 2.3 and later you can use a squiggly heredoc (<<~) to suppress the leading whitespace of content lines:

def test
  <<~END
    First content line.
      Two spaces here.
    No space here.
  END
end

test
# => "First content line.\n  Two spaces here.\nNo space here.\n"

From the Ruby literals documentation:

The indentation of the least-indented line will be removed from each line of the content. Note that empty lines and lines consisting solely of literal tabs and spaces will be ignored for the purposes of determining indentation, but escaped tabs and spaces are considered non-indentation characters.

Answer 3

If you're using Rails 3.0 or newer, try #strip_heredoc. This example from the docs prints the first three lines with no indentation, while retaining the last two lines' two-space indentation:

if options[:usage]
  puts <<-USAGE.strip_heredoc
    This command does such and such.
 
    Supported options are:
      -h         This message
      ...
  USAGE
end

The documentation also notes: "Technically, it looks for the least indented line in the whole string, and removes that amount of leading whitespace."

Here's the implementation from active_support/core_ext/string/strip.rb:

class String
  def strip_heredoc
    indent = scan(/^[ \t]*(?=\S)/).min.try(:size) || 0
    gsub(/^[ \t]{#{indent}}/, '')
  end
end

And you can find the tests in test/core_ext/string_ext_test.rb.

Answer 4

I needed to use something with system whereby I could split long sed commands across lines and then remove indentation AND newlines...

def update_makefile(build_path, version, sha1)
  system <<-CMD.strip_heredoc(true)
    \\sed -i".bak"
    -e "s/GIT_VERSION[\ ]*:=.*/GIT_VERSION := 20171-2342/g"
    -e "s/GIT_VERSION_SHA1[\ ]:=.*/GIT_VERSION_SHA1 := 2342/g"
    "/tmp/Makefile"
  CMD
end

So I came up with this:

class ::String
  def strip_heredoc(compress = false)
    stripped = gsub(/^#{scan(/^\s*/).min_by(&:length)}/, "")
    compress ? stripped.gsub(/\n/," ").chop : stripped
  end
end

Default behavior is to not strip newlines, just like all the other examples.

Answer 5

Here's a far simpler version of the unindent script that I use:

class String
  # Strip leading whitespace from each line that is the same as the 
  # amount of whitespace on the first line of the string.
  # Leaves _additional_ indentation on later lines intact.
  def unindent
    gsub /^#{self[/\A[ \t]*/]}/, ''
  end
end

Use it like so:

foo = {
  bar: <<-ENDBAR.unindent
    My multiline
      and indented
        content here
    Yay!
  ENDBAR
}
#=> {:bar=>"My multiline\n  and indented\n    content here\nYay!"}

---

If the first line may be indented more than others, and want (like Rails) to unindent based on the least-indented line, you may instead wish to use:

class String
  # Strip leading whitespace from each line that is the same as the 
  # amount of whitespace on the least-indented line of the string.
  def strip_indent
    if mindent=scan(/^[ \t]+/).min_by(&:length)
      gsub /^#{mindent}/, ''
    end
  end
end

Note that if you scan for \s+ instead of [ \t]+ you may end up stripping newlines from your heredoc instead of leading whitespace. Not desirable!

Answer 6

<<- in Ruby will only ignore leading space for the ending delimiter, allowing it to be properly indented. It does not strip leading space on lines inside the string, despite what some documentation online might say.

You can strip leading whitespace yourself by using gsub:

<<-EOF.gsub /^\s*/, ''
    \tSELECT
    \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
    \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
    \tFROM #{table.call}
EOF

Or if you just want to strip spaces, leaving the tabs:

<<-EOF.gsub /^ */, ''
    \tSELECT
    \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
    \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
    \tFROM #{table.call}
EOF