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Add Make A Long String Of Text Readable as a Ruby TIL

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jbranchaud
2026-02-12 17:30:15 -06:00
parent f186d5977d
commit ec12f7ea80
2 changed files with 40 additions and 1 deletions

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# Make A Long String Of Text Readable
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.
```ruby
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.
```ruby
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`:
```ruby
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}."
```