Tackling Multiline Strings in JavaScript: The Ins and Outs

Hey there, fellow coders! Let’s chat about something that’s been a bit of a pain point in JavaScript for the longest time—multiline strings. Back in the day, we had to jump through some serious hoops to get our strings to span multiple lines without throwing a hissy fit. But fear not, because the times are a-changin’, and we’ve got some nifty tricks up our sleeve now.

The Old-School Way: \n and Concatenation

Before ES6 came along and saved the day, if you wanted to create a multiline string, you were stuck using the newline character \n or string concatenation. It looked a little something like this:

var oldSchoolMultiline = 'This is an old-school multiline string.\n' +
                         'You had to use the newline character to break lines.\n' +
                         'And boy, did it make your code look cluttered.';
console.log(oldSchoolMultiline);

This approach was clunky, and let’s be honest, it made your code look like it was trying to do the limbo under those low, low readability bars.

Enter Template Literals

With ES6, JavaScript introduced template literals, and they’ve been a game-changer for handling multiline strings. You use backticks (`) instead of quotes, and voila, you can drop in line breaks wherever you please:

``javascript
let templateLiteralMultiline =Now this is a story all about how
My strings
got