Whitespace Slurping with expression/output tag'<%=, <%-'.

Feature: Add support for having expression/output tags which support removing white space before them.

Description: Need expressions tag which can also remove the white space before the tag. Its a combination of <%= and <%_.

Tags Introduced:

• <%=_ Outputs the value into the template (escaped), strips all whitespace before it
• <%-_ Outputs the unescaped value into the template, strips all whitespace before it

Use case: I want to write markdown inside the EJS template. Since markdown heavily relies on indentation(and whitespaces), I want my EJS code to be indented in itself but not adding extra white space to markdown.

Example

For generating a markdown like following.

Heading

• No: 1
• No: 2

Basic implementation.

<% if(condition) {%>
<%= '**Heading**' %>
    <% [1,2].forEach((i) => {%>
<%=  '* No: '+i %>
    <% }) %>
<% } %>

To write indented code.

Implementation with existing tag(‘Whitespace Slurping’ ).

<% if(condition ) {%>
    <%_ %><%= '**Heading**' %>
    <% [1,2].forEach((i) => {%>
        <%_ %><%=  '* No: '+i %>
    <% }) %>
<% } %>

Implementation with new tag.

<% if(condition ) {%>
    <%=_ '**Heading**' %>
    <% [1,2].forEach((i) => {%>
        <%=_  '* No: '+i %>
    <% }) %>
<% } %>

Proposal: #PR 290

[mde]

Definitely seems more reasonable to provide hooks to this for a plugin. We already have too many different permutations of whitespace stripping or formatting directly in EJS. Rather than building more and more facilities for handling formatting, we should be making it easy for people to offload that formatting to their chosen tools. I’m going to close this issue now, although I would love some input on an API for making plugins easy to use.

[RyanZim]

That does look weird, though. @mde Is this a feature we want?