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=head1 TITLE
Whitespace and Here Docs
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: Richard Proctor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 16 Aug 2000
Version: 1
Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Number: 111
=head1 ABSTRACT
With a here doc print <<ZZZ; the ZZZ has to be at the start of a line and
the text of the here doc, is processed verbatum. This results in Here Docs
that either stick out in the code, or result in unwanted leading whitespace.
There are several FAQs that relate to this problem. This proposal tidies
this up.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Suggested syntax:
print <<<xxx, <<<"xxx", print <<<'yyy', or print <<<`zzz`.
I had earlier proposed an alternitive syntax "print <<'zzz'/x", but that
above was the "prefered" option when this was originally discussed on p5p.
This will ignore all leading white space on each line until the end terminator
is found. It effectively does s/^\s*// before processing each following line.
It also ignores whitespace (but not the line termination) after
the terminator.
Personally I find such blocks very usefull for cgi programming, when delivering
large blocks of fixed html.
Thus these are equivalent:
print <<ZZZ;
This is what is wanted but it sticks out in the code, and I have to
remember to put the ZZZ at the begining of the line, and be carefull about
whitespace after the ZZZ.
ZZZ
print <<<ZZZ;
This is what is wanted, it will be printed without this leading
space and the terminator ZZZ is recogised even if there is a
space after it.
ZZZ
Except that the last case does not stickout and the ZZZ can be embeded nicely.
(Note I am only on the announce list at present as I am suffering
from negative free time).
=head1 IMPLENTATION
This should be a relatively simple addition to perl
(I think just to scan_heredoc in toke.c + docs in perl5)
=head1 REFERENCES
This was discussed on p5p a year ago and I partially implemented
it but ran out of free time.
