Multiline Strings in Scala

You want to create multiline strings within your Scala source code, like you can with the heredoc syntax of other languages and help in escaping quotes and other symbols.

A heredoc is a way to define a multiline string, while
maintaining the original indentation & formatting.This is used
to embed snippets of code, like SQL or HTML.

A great feature of Scala strings is that you can create multiline strings by including the string inside three double-quotes:

val multiline = """First line starts
                   Second line
                   Third line ends."""

Although this works, the second and third lines in this example will end up with whitespace at the beginning of their lines. If you print the string, it looks like this:

First line starts
                   Second line
                   Third line ends

You can solve this problem in several different ways. First, you can left-justify every line after the first line of your string:

val multiline = """First line starts
Second line
Third line ends"""

A cleaner approach is to add the stripMargin method to the end of your multiline string and begin all lines after the first line with the pipe symbol |:

val multiline = """First line starts
                   |Second line
                   |Third line ends""".stripMargin

If you don’t like using the | symbol, you can use any character you like with the stripMargin method:

val multiline = """First line starts
                   #Second line
                   #Third line ends""".stripMargin(#)

All of these approaches yield the same result, a multiline string with each line of the string left justified:

First line starts
Second line
Third line ends

This results in a true multiline string, with a hidden \n character after the word “and” in the first line. To convert this multiline string into one continuous line you can add a replaceAll method after the stripMargin call, replacing all newline characters with blank spaces:

val multiline = """First line starts
                   |Second line
                   |Third line ends""".stripMargin.replaceAll("\n", " ")

This yields:

First line starts Second line Third line ends

Using triple quotes to escape characters

If you have used another programming language like Java or .NET in the past, you would be familiar with escaping quotes in a String using backslash \

val exampleJson: String = "{\"name\":\"xyz\",\"level\":\"high\",\"price\":2.50}" 
println(s"exampleJson = $exampleJson")

You will see the below output if you run your Scala application.

exampleJson = {"name":"xyz","level":"high","price":2.50}

This is great but if you have longer text to escape, it will become very hectic to escape each and every individual quote within your JSON String.
Fortunately Scala has a much better solution! To help you easily escape characters and symbols inside strings, you just need to wrap the text within triple quotes 

val exampleJson: String = """{"name":"xyz","level":"high","price":2.50}"""
println(s"exampleJson = $exampleJson")

You will see the same output if you run above code snippet.

exampleJson = {"name":"xyz","level":"high","price":2.50}