Haml: Control whitespace around text

Question

In my Rails template, I\'d like to accomplish final HTML to this effect using HAML:

I will first link somewhere

        

Answer 1

Although not well documented, this is cleanly achieved using HAML whitespace preservation (>) combined with an ASCII space (& #32;), and not with helpers:

%a{:href=>'/home'}> Home link
,  
%a{:href=>'/page'} Next link

This will produce what you want:

<a href='/home'>Anchor text</a>,&#32;
<a href='/page'>More text</a>

But I agree, HAML needs to come up with a better way of doing this, as it does add unnecessary ASCII characters to the page (but it's still more efficient than using helpers).

Answer 2

Yet another option that I've used in the past:

- if @condition
  %span> , then some more text after the link.

Answer 3

The preserve function worked for me

.white-space-pre= preserve "TEXT"

Answer 4

You can use the 'aligator syntax' of HAML

Whitespace Removal: > and <

and < give you more control over the whitespace near a tag. > will remove all whitespace surrounding a tag, while < will remove all whitespace immediately within a tag. You can think of them as alligators eating the whitespace: > faces out of the tag and eats the whitespace on the outside, and < faces into the tag and eats the whitespace on the inside. They’re placed at the end of a tag definition, after class, id, and attribute declarations but before / or =.

http://haml.info/docs/yardoc/file.REFERENCE.html#whitespace_removal__and_

Answer 5

The solution that I got working is:

I will first
= link_to 'link somewhere', 'http://example.com'
- if @condition
  = ", then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met"

You can use =, though = is used to output the result of Rails code, but here it will server the purpose.

Answer 6

A better way to do this has been introduced via Haml's helpers:

surround

= surround '(', ')' do
  %a{:href => "food"} chicken

Produces:

(<a href='food'>chicken</a>)

succeed:

click
= succeed '.' do
  %a{:href=>"thing"} here

Produces:

click
<a href='thing'>here</a>.

precede:

= precede '*' do
  %span.small Not really

Produces:

*<span class='small'>Not really</span>

To answer the original question:

I will first
= succeed ',' do
  = link_to 'link somewhere', 'http://example.com'
- if @condition
  then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met

Produces:

I will first
<a href="http://example.com">link somewhere</a>,
then render this half of the sentence if a condition is met