NAME Filter::HereDocIndent - Indent here documents SYNOPSIS use Filter::HereDocIndent; # an indented block with an indented here doc if ($sometest) { print <<'(MYDOC)'; Melody Starflower Miko (MYDOC) } outputs (with text beginning at start of line): Melody Starflower Miko HereDocIndent mimics the planned behavior of here documents in Perl 6. INSTALLATION Filter::HereDocIndent can be installed with the usual routine: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install DEPENDENCIES HereDocIndent requires Filter::Util::Call, which is part of the standard distribution starting with Perl 5.6.0. For earlier versions of Perl you will need to install Filter::Util::Call, which requires either a C compiler or a pre-compiled binary. DESCRIPTION HereDocIndent allows you to indent your here documents along with the rest of the code. The contents of the here doc and the ending delimiter itself may be indented with any amount of whitespace. Each line of content will have the leading whitespace stripped off up to the amount of whitespace that the closing delimiter is indented. Only whitespace is stripped off the beginning of the line, never any other characters For example, in the following code the closing delimiter is indented eight spaces: if ($sometest) { print <<'(MYDOC)'; Melody Starflower Miko (MYDOC) } All of the content lines in the example will have the leading eight whitespace characters removed, thereby outputting the content at the beginning of the line: Melody Starflower Miko If a line is indented more than the closing delimiter, it will be indented by the extra amount in the results. For example, this code (+ is used to indicate spaces): if ($sometest) { ++++++++print <<'(MYDOC)'; ++++++++Melody +++++++++++Starflower ++++++++Miko ++++++++(MYDOC) } produces this output: Melody +++Starflower Miko HereDocIndent does not distinguish between different types of whitespace. If you indent the closing delimiter with a single tab, and the contents eight spaces, each line of content will lose just one space character. The best practice is to be consistent in how you indent, using just tabs or just spaces. HereDocIndent will only remove leading whitespace. If one of the lines of content is not indented, the non-whitespace characters will not be removed. The trailing newline is never removed. INDENT_CONTENT By default the contents of the here document are indented to the same extent as the closing delimiter. If you want to leave the contents indented, but still indent the closing delimiter so that it lines up with its content, set the INDENT_CONTENT option to zero in when you load HereDocIndent: use Filter::HereDocIndent INDENT_CONTENT=>0; NWS BUG: Please note that there is a bug I haven't resolved with NWS filtering. If the {nws} string appears at the beginning or end of the heredoc then it's not stripped out. In the middle it should be OK. The NWS option helps you clean up the contents of heredocs by allowing you to add whitespace in your perl code but have it stripped out when your program runs. To enable NWS ("no whitespace") filtering, add the NWS option to the "use" command: use Filter::HereDocIndent NWS=>1; Anywhere in a heredoc that HereDocIndent sees the string {nws} it will strip out that string and all surrounding whitespace. NWS is handy for outputting strings like HTML where avoiding whitespace can clutter up your code. For example, the following code will output HTML without any spaces between the tags: print <<"(HTML)"; {nws} logo {nws} (HTML) LIMITATIONS HereDocIndent was written to be conservative in what it decides are here documents. HereDocIndent recognizes the most common usage for here docs and disregards other less common usages. If you constrain your here doc declarations to the format recognized by HereDocIndent (which is by far the most popular format) then your code will compile just fine. The format recognized by HereDocIndent is a single print statement or variable assignment, followed by <<, then a quoted string or unquoted string of word characters, then a semicolon, then the end of line. Here are a few examples that would be parsed properly by HereDocIndent: print << '(MYDOC)'; print << "MYDOC"; my $var = <