HEREDOC interfering with code indentation

Question

I like the HEREDOC syntax, e.g. for edge cases of generated HTML that are not worth putting into a template.

The only thing that annoys me about it, though, is that the content, and the closing marker of a heredoc string adheres to the first column. This screws up nested code layouts:

class myclass   {       function __construct()       {         $a = some_code();        $b = some_more_code();        $x = <<<EOT  line1 line2 line3 line4  EOT;              $c = even_more_code();         $b = still_more_code();         ...         ...         ... 

you see what I mean.

Now this is probably not solvable using normal HEREDOC. Has anybody worked around this? My dream would be to have HEREDOC syntax with automatic indentation. But I guess this is not possible without writing some pre-compiler for the source files.

Am I correct?

Answer 1

Thank goodness this feature has finally landed in php 7.3 via RFC: Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes

So now your example can cleanly be written as:

class myclass {     function __construct()     {         $a = some_code();         $b = some_more_code();         $x = <<<EOT          line1         line2         line3         line4          EOT;          $c = even_more_code();         $b = still_more_code();     } }