How *not* to use heredoc in Ruby

Sometimes you inherit a codebase that’s so bad, it confuses your IDE. Let’s start with this beauty:

User.
 joins(<<-SQL).
   LEFT JOIN industries
   ON industries.id = users.industry_id
 SQL
 where.
 not(industries: { id: 1 })

What’s your first thought when you see something like that? If you’re convinced it’s a broken code then feel free to play with it your Rails project, just substituting model / table names for something more appropriate in your case.

The above “query” works due to the same reason as the code below:

p <<SQL.gsub(/\s+/, " ").strip
SELECT * FROM     users
        ORDER BY users.id DESC
SQL

After I got my head around this unintuitive syntax, as an exercise I came with a following brainfart, which you may treat as a dessert:

bullet_time = <<""::b
 this works as well
 But FFS, don’t do this

p bullet_time

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