I gave this little tutorial to @dylangrafmyre this morning and wanted to share it.
Net of the story is that while you can trim leading spaces in heredocs in Ruby, it’s probably best just to put the text flush left unless you have something like SQL where leading spaces and a trailing \n don’t matter.
This is fun to try in IRB.
(Note, for some reason you can’t paste the multi-line heredoc into Pry).
Dash before the TXT
The dash allows the closing TXT to not be flush with the left edge of the screen. If you take away the dash, you have to write the example like this
str = <<TXT
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT
With the dash, the closing TXT does not have to be flush with the left edge of the screen.
str = <<TXT
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT
Leading spaces
In this case, str will have leading space at the beginning of each line, and an return at the very end.
str = <<-TXT
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT
Fixing with gsub
In this case, str will have leading space at the beginning of each line, and an return at the very end.
str = <<-TXT.gsub(/^ +/, "")
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT
Fixing with gsub
In this case, str will have leading space at the beginning of each line, and an return at the very end.
str = <<-TXT.gsub(/^ +/, "")
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT
Getting rid of the trailing new line
str = <<-TXT.gsub(/^ +/, "").strip
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT
Doing the above using split, map, strip, join
This is a good exercise in seeing how the enumerable and string methods work:
str = <<-TXT.split("\n").map(&:strip).join("\n")
Updated Record 1
changed home_street1 to XXXXXX
changed home_city to XXXXXX
TXT