Is there an operator that can crop a recess in a multi-line string?

Question

This is really nice in Groovy:

println '''First line, second line, last line''' 

Multiline strings. I saw in some languages ​​tools that take a step further and can remove the indentation of line 2 and so that the operator prints:

 First line, second line, last line 

but not

 First line, second line, last line 

Is this possible in Groovy?

Answer 1

You can use stripMargin() for this:

 println """hello world! |from groovy |multiline string """.stripMargin() 

If you do not need a leading character (for example, in the handset in this case), there is stripIndent() , but the line should be formatted a little differently (since minimal indentation is important)

 println """ hello world! from groovy multiline string """.stripIndent() 

from stripIndent

Separate leading spaces from each line in a line. The line with the least number of leading spaces defines the number to remove. Lines containing only spaces are ignored when calculating the number of leading spaces for the strip.

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Update

Regarding the use of the operator for this, I personally do not recommend doing this. But for records, this can be done using Extension Mechanism or using categories (simpler and clunkier). An example of categories is as follows:

 class StringCategory { static String previous(String string) { // overloads `--` return string.stripIndent() } } use (StringCategory) { println(--''' hello world! from groovy multiline string ''') }