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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

I was going to answer gp "probably not" - but I would've been wrong. It looks to me like Java now has some of the most sophisticated in-line multi-line strings/here-documents that I'm aware of in any language. More details in:

https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/378

I'm not entirely sure "most sophisticated" is entirely a good thing - but the jep looks pretty thorough at least.

Ed: how does Scala do it? Java uses the indents for the closing triple-quote to determine stripping/indent + cutting trailing spaces. Ie, if my reading is correct:

  a = """
         OK.
      """

Is "OK.\n" (even if there are any spaces after the dot).

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At the string literal level doesn't do anything, but the standard library adds an extension method to string called `stripMargin`. This has some nice examples https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/scala-cookbook/97814493...

The indentation is removed at compile time, per the JLS: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se15/html/jls-3.htm...

> Incidental white space is removed, as if by execution of String.stripIndent on the characters resulting from step 1.

The new stripIndent() method is provided as a convenience to developers.

That's for Java, the parent is talking about Scala.

It helps that Java is exclusively a compiled programming language, so these are just syntactic sugar concerns for the parser/lexer and the compiled bytecode ends up looking identical to having just used one long string with inline \n.

So given that, I don't think it really ends up being that sophisticated. I think this could be a decent easy programming question for a technical interview though!

I had to use this recently for an online course. It was super nice:

  def pushConstant(num: Int): String =
    s"""
       |@$num
       |D=A
       |$accessTopOfStack
       |M=D
       |$incrementStackPointer
       |""".stripMargin

accessTopOfStack and incrementStackPointer are other functions that return text. It made composing Assembly a breeze.

Yup, and it’s super nice for json or yaml strings.

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