Code of Conduct

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What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/workflow-commands-for-github-actions#setting-an-output-parameter

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

Due to recent changes, I had to switch our codeflows from using set-output to the method described in the section on "Setting an output parameter", by appending to (the file with the name in the variable) $GITHUB_OUTPUT.

This is very similar to how $GITHUB_ENV works in the previous section.

I had need to post a multiline output, and so decided to just try the technique described for "Environment files" (the preceding section). That is, I used the pattern

{name}<<{delimiter}
{value}
{delimiter}

and ended up with code looking like this:

steps:
  - name: Set the output in bash
    id: step_one
    run: |
      echo 'JSON_RESPONSE<<EOF' >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
      curl https://example.lab >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
      echo 'EOF' >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

And as far as I can tell, this worked great (and is much simpler than what I had to do before).

I think it would be beneficial if this possibility was pointed out by the documentation. Simply saying something akin to "multi-line output values can be set with the same technique used in the previous section to define multi-line environment variables" would already help a lot.

Additional information

No response

edited by maintainer

Content plan here