On 10/22/07, Neil Mitchell
If this now reports no errors, who wants to guess which come up as escape codes, and which don't. The way other languages like C# have dealt with this is by introducing a new type of quoted string:
@":\/"
The C# implementation is really annoying, because quotes appear in strings so often. Whenever I wanted to use that facility its because I have some inline XML, and I have to double up all the quotes after pasting it in. I like the idea of 'heredocs' from Ruby, PHP and others. Using Ruby, I can specify a string fairly easily: puts <<-EOS This is a long string that will print as formatted, including spaces, "quotes" and newlines. EOS Note that quotes and such don't need to be escaped. What's really sweet is Ruby treats that as a string in-place, so if puts took more arguments they just come after the heredoc: puts <<-EOS, "foo", true, 1 My string which doesn't interfere with the arguments above EOS Of course, because strings are just another object in Ruby, you can call methods on the string constructed: puts <<-EOS.length This will print the length of the string. EOS My two cents - I haven't found another language that handles heredocs as nicely as Ruby does. Justin