[LandR]

Doesn't heredoc preserve the indentation unless you strip it back out ? I don't mean identation within the string, I mean level of indentation of where it is in the code

[sandreas]

You can use it without indentication using <<- AND TAB (does not work with spaces, so copy and past won't work on hackernews - replace the spaces of the three content lines with a TAB):

  cat <<-EOF
   content
   not
   indented
   EOF

[jimworm]

The perl-family heredoc syntax could be quite flexible with options. I'm used to ruby which does have an option for indent-stripping.