Thanks for the report, this is a dup of a previous bug which is fixed on master. Perhaps another release is in order...

$ jsonnet -e '|||-
>   abc
> |||'
STATIC ERROR: <cmdline>:1:1: Text block syntax requires new line after |||.

I'm curious to know why you want this?

Pretty feasible I should think. I guess this is only useful if you only have one line?

I'm struggling to understand why anyone would want to have a paragraph of text with no terminating \n :)

The use case is visually concatenating two text blocks together:

local a = ...  // text block a
local b = ...  // text block b
|||
  %s
  %s
||| % [a, b]

If I want b to immediately follow a, I need to chomp the last newline in a.

(Sorry for the late reply. Github often doesn't email me for issue and PR updates.)

Ok that sounds reasonable. It is not hard to add the support. I think a reasonable approach is that the reformatter converts (without consent and with no way to turn it off)

|||-
    foo

|||

to

|||
    foo
|||

With that mode of operation, the presence of a \n in the last byte of the string literal indicates whether |||- should be emitted by the formatter. In other words there is no other state needed to store whether or not |||- was used.

Changes needed are simple:

1. Modify lexer to accept |||-, suppress terminating \n
2. Modify reformatter to emit ||| if there is a terminating \n, |||- otherwise

After (1) one should be able to test the JSON output. However without (2) jsonnet fmt will produce code that does not parse.

I know this is a pretty old issue... but is there still openness to adding this syntax? I'm aware that std.rstripChars(..., '\n') would accomplish a similar goal, but it does have the unfortunate side effect that any number of trailing newlines are stripped rather than just one trailing newline (which is what I would expect from |||-, and I think is what the documented behavior should be).

I really like the approach from #289 (comment).

Edit: My use case for this is also that I'm trying to concatenate multiple multiline string literals without extra newlines in between.