Breaking up long strings on multiple lines in Ruby without stripping newlines

Question

We recently decided at my job to a ruby style guide  One of the edicts is that no line should be wider than 80 characters  Since this is a Rails project  we often have strings that are a little bit longer - i e   User X wanted to send you a message about Thing Y  that doesn t always fit within the 80 character style limit    I understand there are three ways to have a long string span multiple lines    HEREDOC  Q   Actual string concatenation    However  all of these cases end up taking more computation cycles  which seems silly  String concatenation obviously  but for HEREDOC and  Q I have to strip out the newlines  via something like  gsub   n           Is there a pure syntax way to do this  that is equivalent to just having the whole string on one line  The goal being  obviously  to not spend any extra cycles just because I want my code to be slightly more readable   Yes  I realize that you have to make that tradeoff a lot   but for string length  this just seems silly     Update   Backslashes aren t exactly what I want because you lose indentation  which really affects style readability   Example   if foo   string    this is a     string that spans lines    end   I find the above a bit hard to read       EDIT  I added an answer below  three years later we now have the squiggly heredoc

User · Answer

Maybe this is what you re looking for   string    line  1             line  2             line  3   p string     gt   line  1line  2line  3

User · Answer

I had this problem when I try to write a very long url  the following works   image url    w      http   minio 127 0 0 1 xip io 9000      bucket29 docs b7cfab0e-0119-452c-b262-1b78e3fccf38      28ed3774-b234-4de2-9a11-7d657707f79c      X-Amz-Algorithm AWS4-HMAC-SHA256 amp      X-Amz-Credential ABABABABABABABABA      2Fus-east-1 2Fs3 2Faws4 request amp      X-Amz-Date 20170702T000940Z amp      X-Amz-Expires 3600 amp X-Amz-SignedHeaders host amp      X-Amz-Signature ABABABABABABABABABABAB     ABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABA   join   Note  there must not be any newlines  white spaces when the url string is formed   If you want newlines  then use HEREDOC   Here you have indentation for readability  ease of modification  without the fiddly quotes and backslashes on every line   The cost of joining the strings should be negligible

User · Answer

You can use   to indicate that any line of Ruby continues on the next line  This works with strings too   string    this is a   string that spans lines   puts string inspect   will output  this is a string that spans lines

User · Answer

Three years later  there is now a solution in Ruby 2 3  The squiggly heredoc   class Subscription   def warning message      lt  lt  HEREDOC       Subscription expiring soon        Your free trial will expire in   days until expiration  days        Please update your billing information      HEREDOC   end end   Blog post link  https   infinum co the-capsized-eight articles multiline-strings-ruby-2-3-0-the-squiggly-heredoc     The indentation of the least-indented line will be   removed from each line of the content

User · Answer

I modified Zack s answer since I wanted spaces and interpolation but not newlines and used    W    It s a nice day    name     for a walk    join        where name    fred  this produces It s a nice day  fred  for a walk

[ruby-on-rails] Breaking up long strings on multiple lines in Ruby without stripping newlines

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