Description
Stolen from Python but with some differences:
function jabberwock()
"""
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"""
end
julia> print(jabberwock())
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
The point of the """ construct is to make it easy to embed snippets of text or code in a readable, nice way inside of Julia code. To that end, it is similar to "here documents" (shell, Perl, Ruby) as well as Python's multiline strings, which use the same delimiters. However, a couple of additional semantics make these more pleasant to use:
- If the initial
"""is on a line followed only by whitespace, that whitespace will be stripped, including the newline. - Lines following the opening
"""token — up to and including the line on which the closing"""occurs — must begin with the same indentation sequence (identical whitespace characters) as the line on which the opening"""occurs. - This common indentation sequence will be stripped from each line of the multiline quote before the content is further processed — conceptually, it is part of the surrounding Julia code, rather than part of the quoted string.
After this whitespace stripping is applied, all normal string interpretation is performed as for a " string, including unescaping and interpolation. Moreover, you can prefix """ with an identifier as you can with " strings to invoke macro-based custom-string forms. Thus, a Q""" multiline string has no interpolation performed and r""" is a handy multiline regex literal (maybe the x extended regex format should always be on).