Newline slurp and indentation

Lately, I’ve been trying to use the trim-mode closing tag -%> and I understand what it’s doing but I wonder if the current behaviour does make sense or not really. So it’s more of an open question than an issue. I was thinking, but I might be wrong, that the purpose of this tag was to write such template:

<ul>
<% users.forEach(function (user) { -%>
  <li><%= user %></li>
<% }) -%>
</ul>

And it would output something like:

<ul>
  <li>John</li>
  <li>Jane</li>
</ul>

And actually, it will! Nice. But let’s take a code just a little bit more complex with more indentation.

<div>
  <ul>
  <% users.forEach(function (user) { -%>
    <li><%= user %></li>
  <% }) -%>
  </ul>
</div>

I would expect:

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>John</li>
    <li>Jane</li>
  </ul>
</div>

But I got:

<div>
  <ul>
        <li>John</li>
        <li>Jane</li>
      </ul>
</div>

That’s because -%> only remove the following new line (just as mentioned in the doc), meaning it will concatenate both the indentation of the EJS tag and the indentation of the following line. Not sure this makes sense. So the deeper your EJS tag, the worse it will become.

Don’t you think it would be better to remove the following new line and any following white spaces? This way, you could write:

<div>
  <ul>
    <% users.forEach(function (user) { -%>
    <li><%= user %></li>
    <% }) -%>
  </ul>
</div>

(yeah, it’s not exactly the same as the previous one because the EJS tag would now needs to be at the same indentation as its content). This would output:

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>John</li>
    <li>Jane</li>
  </ul>
</div>

Another solution would be to have a syntax to indicate that an opening tag should remove all white spaces before him, meaning that the tag is actually only indented to be more readable but we don’t actually want to output it’s indentation. I would have suggest to use <%- but since it’s already taken, I have no idea so I will use <%+ but that’s just for the purpose of the sample. Pro: you can indent any EJS tag as you want. Con: you have to use both a custom opening and closing tags to remove everything you don’t want.

<div>
  <ul>
  <%+ users.forEach(function (user) { -%>
    <li><%= user %></li>
  <%+ }) -%>
  </ul>
</div>

Would output:

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>John</li>
    <li>Jane</li>
  </ul>
</div>

[andidev]

The proposed PR #105 introduces the following new syntax

<%_ removes any spaces or tabs before the ejs-tag _%> removes any spaces or tabs and a newline after the ejs-tag

this means one can write

<div>
  <ul>
  <%_ users.forEach(function (user) { _%>
    <li><%= user %></li>
  <%_ }) _%>
  </ul>
</div>

and then get the requested output mentioned in this issue

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>John</li>
    <li>Jane</li>
  </ul>
</div>

[mde]

Apologies for the lengthy wait on this.