Using a heredoc as a hash value - ruby

Question

I have a method Embed.toggler that takes a hash argument. With the following code, I'm trying to use a heredoc in the hash.
Embed.toggler({
title: <<-RUBY
#{entry['time']}
#{entry['group']['who']
#{entry['name']}
RUBY
content: content
})
However, I'm getting the following error trace:
syntax error, unexpected ':', expecting tSTRING_DEND
content: content
^
can't find string "RUBY" anywhere before EOF
syntax error, unexpected end-of-input, expecting tSTRING_CONTENT or tSTRING_DBEG or tSTRING_DVAR or tSTRING_END
title: <<-RUBY
^
How I can avoid getting this error?

Answer 1

Add a comma after your <<-RUBY:
Embed.toggler({
title: <<-RUBY,
#{entry['time']}
#{entry['group']['who']
#{entry['name']}
RUBY
content: content
})
this does work in general. I am not sure why it wasn't working in my code though.
It didn't work because hashes require key/value pair to be separated by a comma, like {title: 'my title', content: 'my content' } and your code just didn't have the comma. It was hard to see that because of the cumbersome HEREDOC syntax.
Do you know if there is a way to perform operations on the string?
You're playing with fire. It's always safer (and usually cleaner) to extract a variable and do post-processing on a variable itself:
title = <<-RUBY
#{entry['time']}
#{entry['group']['who']
#{entry['name']}
RUBY
Embed.toggler(title: title.upcase, content: content)
However, if you feel dangerous today, you can just add operations after opening HEREDOC literal, just as you've added the comma:
Embed.toggler({
title: <<-RUBY.upcase,
#{entry['time']}
#{entry['group']['who']
#{entry['name']}
RUBY
content: content
})
But I discourage you from this because it destroys readability.