Breaking up long strings on multiple lines in Ruby without stripping newlines

We recently decided at my job to a ruby style guide. One of the edicts is that no line should be wider than 80 characters. Since this is a Rails project, we often have strings that are a little bit longer - i.e. "User X wanted to send you a message about Thing Y" that doesn't always fit within the 80 character style limit.

I understand there are three ways to have a long string span multiple lines:

• HEREDOC
• %Q{}
• Actual string concatenation.

However, all of these cases end up taking more computation cycles, which seems silly. String concatenation obviously, but for HEREDOC and %Q I have to strip out the newlines, via something like .gsub(/\n$/, '').

Is there a pure syntax way to do this, that is equivalent to just having the whole string on one line? The goal being, obviously, to not spend any extra cycles just because I want my code to be slightly more readable. (Yes, I realize that you have to make that tradeoff a lot...but for string length, this just seems silly.)

Update: Backslashes aren't exactly what I want because you lose indentation, which really affects style/readability.

Example:

if foo
  string = "this is a \  
string that spans lines"  
end

I find the above a bit hard to read.

EDIT: I added an answer below; three years later we now have the squiggly heredoc.

Solution 1:

Maybe this is what you're looking for?

string = "line #1"\
         "line #2"\
         "line #3"

p string # => "line #1line #2line #3"

Solution 2:

You can use \ to indicate that any line of Ruby continues on the next line. This works with strings too:

string = "this is a \
string that spans lines"

puts string.inspect

will output "this is a string that spans lines"