how do i remove leading whitespace chars from ruby heredoc

Question

Hi All,

I'm having a problem with a Ruby heredoc i'm trying to make. It's returning the leading whitespace from each line even though i'm including the - operator, which is supposed to suppress all leading whitespace characters. my method looks like this:

    def distinct_count
    <<-EOF
        \tSELECT
        \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
        \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
        \tFROM #{table.call}
    EOF
end

and my output looks like this:

    => "            \tSELECT\n            \t CAST('SRC_ACCT_NUM' AS VARCHAR(30)) as
COLUMN_NAME\n            \t,COUNT(DISTINCT SRC_ACCT_NUM) AS DISTINCT_COUNT\n
        \tFROM UD461.MGMT_REPORT_HNB\n"

this, of course, is right in this specific instance, except for all the spaces between the first " and \t. does anyone know what i'm doing wrong here?

thx :)

-C

Answer 1

not much to do that I know of I'm afraid. I usually do

def distinct_count
    <<-EOF.gsub /^\s+/, ""
        \tSELECT
        \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
        \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
        \tFROM #{table.call}
    EOF
end

that works but is a bit of a hack

Answer 2

<<- in Ruby will only ignore leading space for the ending delimiter, allowing it to be properly indented. It does not strip leading space on lines inside the string, despite what some documentation online might say.

You can strip leading whitespace yourself by using gsub:

<<-EOF.gsub /^\s*/, ''
    \tSELECT
    \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
    \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
    \tFROM #{table.call}
EOF

Or if you just want to strip spaces, leaving the tabs:

<<-EOF.gsub /^ */, ''
    \tSELECT
    \t CAST('#{name}' AS VARCHAR(30)) as COLUMN_NAME
    \t,COUNT(DISTINCT #{name}) AS DISTINCT_COUNT
    \tFROM #{table.call}
EOF