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Ruby: Removing leading whitespace from HEREDOCs

Henning Koch
March 19, 2015Software engineer at makandra GmbH

If you're on Ruby 2.3+ there's a <<~ operator to automatically unindent HEREDOCs:

str = <<~MESSAGE
  Hello Universe!
  This is me.
             Bye!
MESSAGE
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Read more Show archive.org snapshot

If you have an older Ruby, you can use the String#strip_heredoc Show archive.org snapshot method from ActiveSupport. See Summarizing heredoc in ruby and rails for an example.

Technically, it looks for the least indented line in the whole string, and removes that amount of leading whitespace.

Posted by Henning Koch to makandra dev (2015-03-19 08:40)