How do I remove leading whitespace chars from Ruby HEREDOC?

user_46717 0
Viewed 34793

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 supposed to suppress all leading whitespace characters. my method looks like this:

    def distinct_count
    <<-EOF
        \tSELECT
        \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
        \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
        \tFROM #{table.call}
    EOF
end

and my output looks like this:

    => "            \tSELECT\n            \t CAST('SRC_ACCT_NUM' AS VARCHAR(30)) as
COLUMN_NAME\n            \t,COUNT(DISTINCT SRC_ACCT_NUM) AS DISTINCT_COUNT\n
        \tFROM UD461.MGMT_REPORT_HNB\n"

this, of course, is right in this specific instance, except for all the spaces between the first " and \t. does anyone know what i'm doing wrong here?

heredoc whitespace ruby
11 Answers

If you can't use Ruby 2.3 or newer, but do have 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 was its Rails 3-era 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 matching tests in this version of test/core_ext/string_ext_test.rb.

user_544010

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
user_159820
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