Leading/Trailing Whitespace

I’m trying to make Twitter Bootstrap Dropdown, which requires a space between the bound button label and the .caret class to look right, and I can’t figure out a way to do this in emblem. In slim, I would use either a leading space on the caret or a trailing space on the html ouptut:

.dropdown
    a.btn.btn-default.dropdown-toggle href="#" data-toggle="dropdown"
        => timePeriodLabel
        span.caret

Here are the respective links to the slim documentation: https://github.com/slim-template/slim#trailing-and-leading-whitespace-- https://github.com/slim-template/slim#output-

The only thing I could find in Emblem was the legacy slim trailing space notation in the “Plain Text” section here: http://emblemjs.com/syntax/

I have tried the following: =>, =<, =', span.caret>, span.caret<

[typeoneerror]

+1

Only way I’ve been able to achieve this is like so:

.page-header
  h1
    = name
    '
    small = slug

The ’ with a blank line forces a space b/t elements. Gross, but works.

[wmlele]

What I meant is a way to add a space after the element when it is actually followed by another element at the same level (and not if it is the last element in the container), reproducing how newlines between elements are rendered as a whitespace in html and plain handlebars. I don’t use slim, but haml does the right thing most of the times, and I rarely had to force whitespace.