linebreaks / empty vars in plain text files

[DaafSamson]

Hi, I'm using Mustache to merge plain text templates. I have the following scenario:

data

{
"name":"James"
,"colour":"green"
,"book":"War and peace"
}

template

This is what we know about {{name}}: 
{{#colour}}- Favourite colour is {{colour}}{{/colour}}
{{#fruit}}- Favourite fruit is {{fruit}}{{/fruit}}
{{#book}}- Favourite book is {{book}}{{/book}}

Result:

This is what we know about James: 
- Favourite colour is green

- Favourite book is War and peace

Note the glaring gap between the two lines... Now, in a HTML template this would not be and issue, white spaces and empty lines are eaten by the browser and the result flows nicely. In a plain text environment though, this is an issue.

Is there an established way to deal with this? Is there a construct that drops the line including the line break after the field?

[DaafSamson]

So, I'm probably doing things not needed at all and just missing the point. But I needed a solution and this is what I did.

1. I'm working in powershell (hey, it's an environment). Since there was no project available that met my criteria, I created one: https://github.com/Palloquin/PSStubble/. It's based on Stubble.

2. I added an option to do custom white-space replacement. To achieve this I added my own extra tags to to Mustache standard: {| and |}

3. I use these two regular expressions to clean up after doing a standard (stubble based) Mustache merge: {\|\s*\|}((\r\n)|\r|\n)? --> remove block sstarting and ending with my tags, with nothing but white-space between them, include a potential line-break after the tag ({\|)|(\|}) --> remove leftover tags I simply replace with empty strings

This would result in something like this:

New template:

This is what we know about {{name}}: 
{|{{#colour}}- Favourite colour is {{colour}}{{/colour}}|}
{|{{#fruit}}- Favourite fruit is {{fruit}}{{/fruit}}|}
{|{{#book}}- Favourite book is {{book}}{{/book}}|}

Output

This is what we know about James: 
- Favourite colour is green
- Favourite book is War and peace

This is a quick and dirty hack, I'm sure I'm missing some edge cases, and could do better. I might not even need to do this at all, but heck, it works. I'm very open to comments

[vanta]

Any update here? Noone with the same problem?

[jobol]

I had to change mustach to fix a compatibility with the spec (see https://gitlab.com/jobol/mustach/-/issues/30)

Spec is: a line with a standalone tag is not emitted.

So writing your template as below should make the job

This is what we know about {{name}}: 
{{#colour}}
- Favourite colour is {{colour}}
{{/colour}}
{{#fruit}}
- Favourite fruit is {{fruit}}
{{/fruit}}
{{#book}}
- Favourite book is {{book}}
{{/book}}

I removed the {| |} so this is perhaps not a valuable solution in that case ....

[jgonggrijp]

The above solution is correct. Closing this, as this repository is only about the Mustache website, not about the template language.