Emacs use <tab> inside qq in cperl-mode

Question

I am using qq function to store my SQL requests in Perl. Like this:

    qq{
       SELECT
             table1.name,
             table1.description
       FROM
             table1
       WHERE
             table1.id=?
    }

But in Emacs cperl-mode it's impossible to use tab inside qq, which slows my work. How can I fix it?

Answer 1

Emacs has wonderful facilities that understand syntax really well considering it's not a full parser.

Try this in your init file.

(defun my-cperl-indent-command ()
  "indent as cperl normally

indent relatively inside multi-line strings.
"
  (interactive)
  (let ((state (syntax-ppss)))
    (if (and (nth 3 state)              ;string
             (and (nth 8 state)         ;multi-line?
                  (< (nth 8 state) (point-at-bol))))
        (indent-relative)
      (cperl-indent-command))))

(eval-after-load "cperl-mode" '(define-key cperl-mode-map [remap cperl-indent-command] 'my-cperl-indent-command))

Of course you still need to tweak indent-relative to get it to do exactly what you want. see tab-to-tab-stop