This is one part “I never would have thought of that” and another “gosh damn rails actually has that”.

First, heredocs:

A “here document” is a literal syntax for a multiline String

See Working with Multiline Strings for more details.

The part that caught me off guard was being able to format the heredoc directly.

I had tried:

s = <<-eos
some text here
eos.upcase

This failed because of a formatting error (makes sense when you actually think about the heredoc requirements) and I simply assumed you could not apply formatting directly. Not the end of the world, but still a bit of a bummer.

Why a bummer? I was trying to remove some of the indenting/tabbing introduced in my string because of the heredoc. It was easy enough to work around, but it was going to cause me either add a worthless method or just suck it up and have some ugly formatting in my code. Neither were appealing, but I have a product to ship. :) (I went with the worthless method if you are keeping at score at home. Not sure what that means.)

Any who, a little later I was scanning the Active Support guide and found this gem:

The method strip_heredoc strips indentation in heredocs.

Viewing the source of the method shows you can apply formatting to heredocs by executing the code on the actual declaration of the heredoc.

s = <<-eos.upcase
some text here
eos

assert_equal "SOME TEXT HERE", s

However, the joy in the whole event was realizing my initial problem (ugly formatting) was already a solved problem since I could just use the strip_heredoc method.