Whirlpool

I ask a hard question so in return, I offer a present :-)

Multiline string literals are one of those things that is broken/missing in Javascript compared to other languages like C, PHP, Perl, etc... Sure you can concatenate a series of partial strings with + over multiple lines, but it's not very elegant, is it?

If your browser supports E4X (XML goodness in Javascript) you can leverage it to have real multiline strings in your Javascript code. Basically you just inline an XML fragment which contains a CDATA node, which in turn contains your multiline string. You then stringify that XML fragment... behold:

  var myString = ""+<r><![CDATA[
      <div class="pmcb_top">
        <div class="pmcb_tabs">
          <ul>
            <li>Chat</li>
            <li>Monks'n'stuff</li>­
            <li>Other</li>
          </ul>
        </div>
      </div>
  ]]></r>;

Yes... that works. (You can't have the CDATA node by itself, you need a wrapper element to trigger the E4X parser.)

I have a bigger example on my perlmonks public scratchpad.

Any got any other ways?
Perhaps ways that do not rely on E4X ?

How about:

var s = "\
line 1\n\
line 2\n\
";

Not as clean as a heredoc, but still better than string concatenation.

You bloody legend, I went to google and found the answer on Whirlpool! I've been pulling my hair out over this one.

erroneousBollock, did you get this to work in IE6 at all?