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 strin

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

Maybe this is what you're looking for?

string = "line #1"\
         "line #2"\
         "line #3"

p string # => "line #1line #2line #3"

Answer 3

Three years later, there is now a solution in Ruby 2.3: The squiggly heredoc.

class Subscription
  def warning_message
    <<~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.

Answer 4

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&
    X-Amz-Credential=ABABABABABABABABA
    %2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&
    X-Amz-Date=20170702T000940Z&
    X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&
    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.

Answer 5

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"