How do I enter a multi line variable in Terraform?

It's for the public key variable for testing lab enviroments in my variables.tf file
I tried

<<EOF
the string
EOF


but terraform dosn't seem to like that

Terraform variable type constraints separate "primitive" types from "complex" types. These primitive types include strings:

A primitive type is a simple type that isn't made from any other types. All primitive types in Terraform are represented by a type keyword. The available primitive types are:

• string: a sequence of Unicode characters representing some text, such as "hello".

• number: a numeric value. The number type can represent both whole numbers like 15 and fractional values such as 6.283185.

• bool: either true or false. bool values can be used in conditional logic.

So, simply declaring the variable as a string, with the linebreaks in it would suffice.

StackExchange DevOps Q#9752, answer score: 2