Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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1.951K
· irakli

Faux Heredocs in Node.js/JS

Working with multi-line, unsafe (containing apostrophes or quotation marks) strings is a major pain-in-the-neck in Javascript. Alas, you often need to do such things, especially when quickly testing something or hacking a prototype together.

DISCLAIMER: don't do this in production code.

The following nifty trick creates a faux "HEREDOC" that seems to work in Node.js. As the original commenter on Stack Overflow points out: you should be careful to use it in any browsers because browsers may break the trick at any time

function hereDoc(f) {
  return f.toString().
      replace(/^[^\/]+\/\*!?/, "").
      replace(/\*\/[^\/]+$/, "");
}

var tennysonQuote = hereDoc(function() {/*!
  Theirs not to "make" reply,
  Theirs 'not' to reason why,
  Theirs but to do and die
*/});

source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/5571069

Also, it should be noted that CoffeeScript supports "heredoc" equivalent called Block Strings, natively: http://jashkenas.github.io/coffee-script/#strings (if CoffeeScript is something you can tolerate, that is).

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Wow that's fun, thanks for sharing! :)

over 1 year ago ·