Indented Documents (indoc)

This crate provides a procedural macro for indented string literals. The indoc!() macro takes a multiline string literal and un-indents it so the leftmost non-space character is in the first column.

[dependencies]
indoc = "0.3"

Release notes are available under GitHub releases.

Using Indoc

use indoc::indoc;

fn main() {
    let testing = indoc!("
        def hello():
            print('Hello, world!')

        hello()
        ");
    let expected = "def hello():\n    print('Hello, world!')\n\nhello()\n";
    assert_eq!(testing, expected);
}

Indoc also works with raw string literals:

use indoc::indoc;

fn main() {
    let testing = indoc!(r#"
        def hello():
            print("Hello, world!")

        hello()
        "#);
    let expected = "def hello():\n    print(\"Hello, world!\")\n\nhello()\n";
    assert_eq!(testing, expected);
}

And byte string literals:

use indoc::indoc;

fn main() {
    let testing = indoc!(b"
        def hello():
            print('Hello, world!')

        hello()
        ");
    let expected = b"def hello():\n    print('Hello, world!')\n\nhello()\n";
    assert_eq!(testing[..], expected[..]);
}

Explanation

The following rules characterize the behavior of the indoc!() macro:

1. Count the leading spaces of each line, ignoring the first line and any lines that are empty or contain spaces only.
2. Take the minimum.
3. If the first line is empty i.e. the string begins with a newline, remove the first line.
4. Remove the computed number of spaces from the beginning of each line.

This means there are a few equivalent ways to format the same string, so choose one you like. All of the following result in the string "line one\nline two\n":

indoc!("            /      indoc!(             /      indoc!("line one
   line one        /         "line one        /               line two
   line two       /           line two       /                ")
   ")            /            ")            /

Unindent

Indoc's indentation logic is available in the unindent crate. This may be useful for processing strings that are not statically known at compile time.

The crate exposes two functions:

• unindent(&str) -> String
• unindent_bytes(&[u8]) -> Vec<u8>

use unindent::unindent;

fn main() {
    let indented = "
            line one
            line two";
    assert_eq!("line one\nline two", unindent(indented));
}

License