[swift-evolution] [Accepted] SE-0168: Multi-Line String Literals

[Thorsten Seitz]

> Am 21.04.2017 um 20:48 schrieb Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org>:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 1:45 PM, Erica Sadun <erica at ericasadun.com <mailto:erica at ericasadun.com>> wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 21, 2017, at 12:40 PM, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 8:48 AM, Robert Bennett via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> Xiaodi, I think one thing you're neglecting is that users may never print out a multiline literal string at all. A string might never be printed or read by a human outside of the code it resides in. In this case it seems perfectly reasonable to ask that it be possible to format the string nicely in the code and disregard how it would actually be printed.
>> 
>> Can you give an example of such a use case, where a string is never seen by a human but one cannot insert literal newlines and would need elided ones instead?
> 
> The most common reason is that the code is maintained by a (non-human) developer, who wants to be able to see and update the code in a readable form, but that represents a single line that will automatically wrapped by, for example, a UITextView for (human) consumption. 
> 
> A different scenario from what Robert's describing, but sure. This goes to my question to David Hart. Isn't this an argument for a feature to allow breaking a single-line string literal across multiple lines? What makes this a use case for some feature for _multiline_ string literals in particular?

I think „single-line“ and „multiline“ should foremost apply to the code representation of a string and not its result.
Otherwise "foo\nbar“ would be a multiline string with your reasoning, wouldn’t you agree?

Therefore a multiline string is one which is written over several lines of *code* to make maintenance easier. 
From that follows naturally that as soon as line breaks are introduced for hard wrapping we are talking about multiline strings.

In addition as soon as line breaks are introduced in the code the question of indentation arises which is solved neatly with the multiline string proposal by the position of the ending delimiter which is not possible with single-line strings. 

-Thorsten

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