Is there some reason heredocs fail if there is white space after the closing string? Until I realized what was happening this caused me a good bit of trouble. Invisible characters shouldn't cause stuff to fail.
Example:
s = <<-HEREDOC
bla bla bla
HEREDOC
This fails with:
heredoc.rb:3: can't find string "HEREDOC" anywhere before EOF
heredoc.rb:1: parse error, unexpected $, expecting tSTRING_CONTENT or tSTRING_DB
EG or tSTRING_DVAR or tSTRING_END
Delete the spaces at the end of the 3rd line and it works.
I looked through the relevant PickAxe sections and didn't find anything.
Is there some reason heredocs fail if there is white space after the closing string? Until I realized what was happening this caused me a good bit of trouble. Invisible characters shouldn't cause stuff to fail.
Example:
s = <<-HEREDOC
bla bla bla
HEREDOC This fails with:
heredoc.rb:3: can't find string "HEREDOC" anywhere before EOF
heredoc.rb:1: parse error, unexpected $, expecting tSTRING_CONTENT or tSTRING_DB
EG or tSTRING_DVAR or tSTRING_END
Delete the spaces at the end of the 3rd line and it works.
I looked through the relevant PickAxe sections and didn't find anything.
The thing is, the mechanism depends on an exact match. Here's an
unlikely but possible example of why it might matter. Line 10 is
"EOM"; line 12 is "EOM ".
Example:
s = <<-HEREDOC
bla bla bla
HEREDOC This fails with:
heredoc.rb:3: can't find string "HEREDOC" anywhere before EOF
heredoc.rb:1: parse error, unexpected $, expecting tSTRING_CONTENT or tSTRING_DB
EG or tSTRING_DVAR or tSTRING_END
Delete the spaces at the end of the 3rd line and it works.
It works then because "HEREDOC" is equal to "HEREDOC", when the space at the end is present it's "HEREDOC ". I just tried it at the command line using bash and when there was a space at the end it did not blow up, it merely included the "HEREDOC " as the last line. Removing the space caused it to work correctly. I did not try it under perl or php.
Is there some reason heredocs fail if there is white space after the closing string? Until I realized what was happening this caused me a good bit of trouble. Invisible characters shouldn't cause stuff to fail.
Example:
s = <<-HEREDOC
bla bla bla
HEREDOC This fails with:
heredoc.rb:3: can't find string "HEREDOC" anywhere before EOF
heredoc.rb:1: parse error, unexpected $, expecting tSTRING_CONTENT or tSTRING_DB
EG or tSTRING_DVAR or tSTRING_END
Delete the spaces at the end of the 3rd line and it works.
I looked through the relevant PickAxe sections and didn't find anything.
The thing is, the mechanism depends on an exact match. Here's an
unlikely but possible example of why it might matter. Line 10 is
"EOM"; line 12 is "EOM ".
Actually I don't think I answered your question. Looking at your
example again, it does look odd. "HEREDOCabc" would be ignored,
whereas "HEREDOC " causes a failure. I'm not sure why.
irb(main):001:0> s = <<HEREDOC
irb(main):002:0" bla bla bla
irb(main):003:0" HEREDOC
irb(main):004:0" HEREDOC
=> "bla bla bla\nHEREDOC \n"
with a space at the end of line 3 works as expected.
···
On 7/28/06, dblack@wobblini.net <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
Actually I don't think I answered your question. Looking at your
example again, it does look odd. "HEREDOCabc" would be ignored,
whereas "HEREDOC " causes a failure. I'm not sure why.
--
Regards,
John Wilger
-----------
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland