On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Tobia <tobia.confo...@gruppo4.eu> wrote:
> Hi all,
> regarding issue #2594 "Template system should handle whitespace
> better" explaining the need for some kind of (optional) whitespace
> stripping from the output of templates, I've been looking at the
> proposed solutions and compared them to other template and macro
> engines.
>
> In particular, a historical but still widely used and general-purpose
> macro engine is m4. Its own feature for controlled newline stripping
> is the "dnl" reserved word, "Discard to Next Line." It works by
> "chomping" all input until and including the next newline.
>
> For example, to call a macro foo() without copying over the newline
> that appears after the macro call in the template, a m4 programmer
> would write:
>
> foo('bar`, `whatever')dnl
>
> An equivalent feature in Django templates would enable template
> developers to strip newlines from specific lines, while keeping
> backwards compatibility with existing templates.
>
> So if the general idea is well-accepted, I propose the "{#" token. The
> example from the issue would become:
>
> <ul>
> {% for item in items %}{#
> <li>{{ item }}</li>
> {% endfor %}{#
> </ul>
>
> It is already a reserved token in the template system, so it's not
> going to break anything. The existing comment syntax {# ... #} is
> already restricted to single-line comments, so there are no multi-line
> comments that would break. Plus, I'd wager it could be implemented
> quite efficiently.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Tobia
>
I'd be strongly -1 on anything that makes template language look more like m4!
Having said that, I can see this being useful. We use templates to
render most kinds of output. When we render text emails, the newlines
and indentation are particularly important, as everything gets
displayed 'as-is' by the client, and having a template that is
readable and also renders correctly is tricky.
Generally where this happens is where we open a block level tag, and
would then normally have a newline for readability, but cannot due to
us not wanting a newline to appear. This could be addressed by having
a different open/close tag for tags which chomp the preceeding/next
character if it is a newline. Eg:
In your folder are:
{^ for item in folder ^}
{{ item }},
{^ endfor ^}
This would render as "In your folder are: item1,item2,item3,"
Changing some of the carets:
In your folder are:
{% for item in folder ^}
{{ item }},
{^ endfor %}
This would render as "In your folder are:\nitem1,item2,item3,\n"
I'm not 100% convinced though.
Cheers
Tom
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