Force the generator to not indent specific lines/block content?

[Zuni Leone]

In my case specifically, for Lua's long strings, e.g:

_ = [[

hello

world

]]

If this is within an indented context, the indent will affect the content of the string, which I don't want. I'm using a custom generator (which is currently almost a copy of the built in LuaGenerator) — is there a way to un-indent these inner lines, short of doing some messy stuff rewriting the parent CodeGenerator class?

Thanks, Blockly people :)

[Neil Fraser]

That's a valid and interesting use case.

You can easily turn off all indentation with a simple property assignment.  Here's where I'm doing this for assembly language:

https://github.com/NeilFraser/AGC-code/blob/main/Blockly/html/generator/generator.js#L20

That said, you want very specific lines within an already assembled block of code to not indent, while allowing all other lines to indent.  I can't think of any clean ways of doing this.  The active code is here:

https://github.com/RaspberryPiFoundation/blockly/blob/main/packages/blockly/core/generator.ts#L374

It's not pretty, but might I suggest this approach:

1) When generating a long string literal, prefix each non-indenting line with a special character.  The null character '\0' would probably be the best choice.

2) Allow indenting to happen as normal.

3) On the final generated program, run this regexp: .replace(/^\s+\0/g, '') This will strip all the unwanted indents from those lines.

--

Neil Fraser, Switzerland
https://neil.fraser.name

[Neil Fraser]

Er, make that regexp:  .replace(/^\s*\0/g, '')

So that it also catches cases where there is no indent.

[Zuni Leone]

Thanks! That worked great, with a tiny regex tweak: .replace(/^\s*\0/gm, "")