Squish Those Strings

While reading some Rails code, I came across a deprecation warning:

ActiveSupport::Deprecation.warn(<<-MESSAGE.squish)
  `redirect_to :back` is deprecated and will be removed from Rails 5.1.
  Please use `redirect_back(fallback_location: fallback_location)` where
  `fallback_location` represents the location to use if the request has
  no HTTP referer information.
MESSAGE

What caught my eye was the squish method on the heredoc. It’s common to see methods after heredocs to clean up formatting, but squish is a great method name.

squish removes all leading and trailing whitespace, then replaces all consecutive whitespace with a single space. One application has been cleaning up long string messages that use the line continuation operator. The community style guide says to only use line continuations for concatenating strings, but I think squish is cleaner:

long_string = "a long string " \
              "spanning " \
              "three lines"
# => "a long string spanning three lines"

better_long_string = "a long string
                      squished to a single line
                      without extra spaces or backslashes".squish
# => "a long string squished to a single line without extra spaces or backslashes"

An all-too-common caveat: squish is an extenstion method from active_support.

Written on April 20, 2017 by jasonschweier