%L for Literals

Although Kotlin’s string templates usually work well in cases when you want to include literals into generated code, KotlinPoet offers additional syntax inspired-by but incompatible-with String.format(). It accepts %L to emit a literal value in the output. This works just like Formatter’s %s:

private fun computeRange(name: String, from: Int, to: Int, op: String): FunSpec {
  return FunSpec.builder(name)
    .returns(Int::class)
    .addStatement("var result = 0")
    .beginControlFlow("for (i in %L..<%L)", from, to)
    .addStatement("result = result %L i", op)
    .endControlFlow()
    .addStatement("return result")
    .build()
}

Literals are emitted directly to the output code with no escaping. Arguments for literals may be strings, primitives, and a few KotlinPoet types described below.