I have a paragraph of text that interpolates a couple user-specific values before being included in an API request. Because it is being passed to an API, it is a single-line string value. However, in the editor it is hard to read like that because it overflows way past the edge of the viewport.
description = "This is the description we need to provide for #{user.name} as part of an API request dealing with compliance and registration for a service. If you need to contact them, their email is #{user.email}."I'd rather make this easier on myself and others to read from the editor while
still being able to submit a single-line string to the API. That can be
accomplished with a heredoc and some combination or gsub, strip, and
squish.
If we are in a strictly Ruby-only context, we can use gsub and strip to
collapse line breaks and remove surrounding white space.
description = <<~MSG.gsub(/\s+/, ' ').strip
This is the description we need to provide for #{user.name} as part
of an API request dealing with compliance and registration for a
service. If you need to contact them, their email is #{user.email}.
MSG
#=> "This is the description we need to provide for #{user.name} as part of an API request dealing with compliance and registration for a service. If you need to contact them, their email is #{user.email}."Or in a Rails context, I can instead just use squish:
description = <<~MSG.squish
This is the description we need to provide for #{user.name} as part
of an API request dealing with compliance and registration for a
service. If you need to contact them, their email is #{user.email}.
MSG
#=> "This is the description we need to provide for #{user.name} as part of an API request dealing with compliance and registration for a service. If you need to contact them, their email is #{user.email}."