I posted a snippet which will handle this at Unindent HERE docs. Also, if you want to indent the closing token, put the leading token in quotes.

print <<'    END';
    This is text.
    END
[download]

sorry for the nit-pick, but given the OP's example showed a variable, the example really should have been.

if ($foo) {
  print <<"  STRING";
  foo is $foo.
  STRING
}
[download]

With the difference being that I've used double quotes and not single quotes. I mention it becuase I missed this the first time I saw heredocs, and didn't realise it caused the entire contents of the heredoc to be either interpolated or not, dependant on whether you used double or single quotes, respectively.

The output of the above would obviously be


foo is whatever_is_in_foo

as opposed to single quotes, which would give


foo is $foo

---
my name's not Keith, and I'm not reasonable.

No need to apologize for the nitpick. It's a point well-taken.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

Intended Here Documents were introduced with 5.26.

Indented Here-documents

This adds a new modifier "~" to here-docs that tells the parser that it should look for /^\s*$DELIM\n/ as the closing delimiter.

These syntaxes are all supported:

<<~EOF;
<<~\EOF;
<<~'EOF';
<<~"EOF";
<<~`EOF`;
<<~ 'EOF';
<<~ "EOF";
<<~ `EOF`;
[download]

The "~" modifier will strip, from each line in the here-doc, the same whitespace that appears before the delimiter.

Newlines will be copied as-is, and lines that don't include the proper beginning whitespace will cause perl to croak.

For example:

if (1) {
  print <<~EOF;
    Hello there
    EOF
}
[download]

prints "Hello there\n" with no leading whitespace.

Probably my favourite improvement since // defined-or.

    ($v = <<"    END") =~ s/^\s+//gm;
    foo bar
    and so on
    END
[download]

Take a peek at Filter::Indent::HereDoc, it does exactly what you need.

I use the quote operators in place of heredocs whenever possible (perlop), because it looks better. This adds a leading newline and trailing whitespace to the string, but when that's not important, I like it.

QqFoo

if ($foo) {
  print qq {
    foo is $foo.
  };
}
[download]