Clojure Long Literal String

Question

What I want

Some programming languages have a feature for creating multi-line literal strings, for example:

some stuff ... <<EOF
  this is all part of the string
  as is this
  \ is a literal slash
  \n is a literal \ followed by a literal n
  the string ends on the next line
EOF

Question: Does Clojure have something similar to this? I realize that " handles multi-line fine, but I want it to also properly handle \ as a literal.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You might be interested in this little function.

(defn long-str [& strings] (clojure.string/join "\n" strings))

You'd use like so

(long-str "This is the first line. Implicitly I want a new line"
          "When I put a new line in the function call to create a new line")

This does require extra double quotes, but would be closer to what you want.

Answer 2

If you need a \ character in the string, just escape it. You don't have to do anything additional to support multiline strings, for example:

"hello \\
there \\
world "

=> "hello \\\nthere \\\nworld"

EDIT :

Now that you've clarified that you don't want to escape the \ character, I'm afraid that Clojure doesn't offer a special syntax for escaping characters, this has been asked before. In essence, Clojure deals with the same string syntax as Java, with no special syntax available.