PROPOSAL: Multiline strings (original) (raw)

Stefan Schulz schulz at e-spirit.de
Sun Mar 8 10:17:04 PDT 2009

I quite liked the idea of handling newlines by adding methods to String, to overcome magic conversions. When reading back about indentation etc., I wonder, why not to apply a similar technique to get rid of indent-related white spaces.

Another question on multi-line Strings I have: does it make sense to allow a multi-line String only having one line? If not, why not using the sequence double-quote plus newline as marker for multi-line Strings? But maybe I overlook the significance in using a seperate marker here or problems that might occur during compilation.

According to the above thoughts, the following would assign a multi-line String:

String myString = " SELECT name FROM persons WHERE age > 21";

And one could invoke some additional methods on it, e.g.:

myString.removeIndents(); // first line defines indent myString.removeWhitespaces(); // HTML style space removal

I don't think that wrong indentation inside a String should lead to a compiler error, that's why methods like above would suffice IMO. All the compiler would have to do is to automatically add (platform specific) line breaks.

Stefan

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