Trim Self

Remove trailing newline and leading indent on tags that do not replace itself with content, only.

Similar to autoTrim, but does not trim aggressively. In effect, it makes tags such as [/]function, [/]if, and other tags that do not get replaced with content (such as echo), appear as though they were not there.

Only these kind of whitespace are removed:

• Spaces and tabs, preceded by a single newline – in other words, indents. This is replaced by a single newline – in other words, indents removed.
• One trailing newline on this kind of tags, this single \n OR \r\n is removed.

No other kind of whitespace around such tags are removed, unlike autoTrim.

Example

Template:

<p>
  Text before.
  {{ set name = "world" }}
  Hello, {{ name }}!
</p>

Without trim-self:

<p>
  Text before
__
  Hello, world!
</p>

Trailing spaces represented as _.

After trim-self:

<p>
  Text before.
  Hello, {{ name }}!
</p>

Here’s the step-by-step transformation for the {{ set ... }} tag:

1. <p>
     Text before.
     {{ set name = "world" }}
     Hello, {{ name }}!
   </p>

2. <p>
     Text before.
     {{ set name = "world" }}  Hello, {{ name }}!
   </p>

3. <p>
     Text before.
   {{ set name = "world" }}  Hello, {{ name }}!
   </p>

4. After vento’s processing:

   <p>
     Text before.
     Hello, {{ name }}!
   </p>

   <p>
     Text before.
     Hello, world!
   </p>

Check out the tests for self-documenting examples.

Why trimSelf when we already have autoTrim, or the built in {{- -}}?

Auto-trim does a great job at doing what it’s supposed to do, but both auto-trim and the built in trimming functionality (similar to Go templates), removes whitespace too aggressively.

For instance, consider this template:

Inline {{ if true }}test{{ /if }}

- {{ if true }}List item{{ else }}Other list item{{ /if }}

With autoTrim, it would be transformed into:

Inlinetest

-List item

Trim-self does what you expect out of a plugin that will simply “make template tags produce code such that it was as though they weren’t there.”

Inline test

- List item

Furthermore, autoTrim will remove trailing spaces followed by a newline, while this may desirable in general, trimSelf does not do this because this functionality should be delegated to editors and tooling.