How to break up long strings without embeded newlines appearing?

[gyre]

I have the following snippet of logstash config that contains a long string.

(the actual string is around 200 characters long as it contains a lot of %{blah} references.)

output {
    file {
        path => "/tmp/foo.txt"
        codec => line {
            format => "a really long string that would be nicer if broken up into smaller bits"
        }
    }
}

I'd like to break this string across multiple lines for readability, but simply putting a backslash at the end of each line doesn't seem to work as this causes multiple lines in the output.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks.

-- ange --