RFC: add triple-quote string literals, e.g., """abc"""

[nolta]

No description provided.

[catawbasam]

woot!

[nolta]

Now w/ whitespace prefix stripping:

julia> s = """
           a
            b
           """
"a\n b"

[kmsquire]

In this incarnation, it seems impossible to intentionally indent text and simultaneously leave off a trailing newline.

[nolta]

@kmsquire Which incarnation?

julia> s = """
            a
            b
           """
" a\n b"

julia> s = """
            a
            b\n
           """
" a\n b\n"

[JeffBezanson]

True, if you want a trailing newline it's easy to just add one:

julia> str = """
               Hello,
               world.
             """
"  Hello,\n  world."

julia> str = """
               Hello,
               world.

             """
"  Hello,\n  world.\n"

[kmsquire]

Sorry @nolta, I had misinterpreted your statement about stripping newlines--I agree that they should be stripped at the end. WITHOUT stripping, as @StefanKarpinski wants, would make it hard to intentionally indent and leave off a final newline.

(Note to self to actually test code before commenting... :-/)

[JeffBezanson]

Ok, let's merge this! It doesn't break anything and we can tweak if necessary. I think we should go with nolta's behavior since it's easier to add more newlines than to figure out how to get rid of a newline you don't want.

[StefanKarpinski]

I object:

• Bash, Perl and Ruby all keep the trailing newline in their here docs.
• Python and Ruby's triple quotes keep the trailing newline (of course, they also keep the leading newline).
• I cannot recall a single time in all of these languages that I've ever needed to strip the trailing newline off of a multiline here doc / triple quote. Sure, I want to get rid of the leading newline, that's an annoyance, but you want the trailing newline.

[StefanKarpinski]

I should clarify that I only object to not keeping the trailing newline. The rest of it is great.

[JeffBezanson]

Ok, I won't hold up merging over this. Not that important to me.

[nolta]

Ok, i pushed a fix which hopefully makes everybody happy:

s = """
     a
    """  # == " a\n"

s = """
     a"""  # == "a"

[StefanKarpinski]

Excellent.