How to make GSP tag generate code on one line?

I am dynamically adding a select box inside a div element with the following code:

$('#worker').html('<g:select class = "dropdown" name="worker" from="${workers}" optionKey="id" optionValue="name" />');

The problem with this code is that when the g:select tag expands, it will generate the code as follows:

    $('#worker').html('<select onchange="handleWorkerChange(this)" class="dropdown" name="worker" id="worker" >
<option value="2" >Worker1</option>
<option value="4" >Worker1</option>
<option value="18" >Worker1</option>
<option value="19" >Worker1</option>
</select>');

As you can see above, when expanding, the option tags are in new lines so this will cause syntax error in JavaScript. Is there a way so that the select gsp tag will expand to a single line string so that the select box can be embedded dynamically in a div?

Solution

g:select is also available just as a method within the GSP:

${select(from:aList,value:aValue)}

Taking advantage of this and the fact that then we are just dealing with a text (org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.util.StreamCharBuffer), we can remove the new line characters:

$('#worker').html('${ select(
    class: 'dropdown', 
    from: workers, 
    optionKey='id', 
    optionValue: 'name', 
    name: 'worker'
).replace(System.getProperty("line.separator"), '') }');

This should result in the entire select be placed on a single line.

Initially, I wasn't sure myself exactly what was causing the select being placed over several lines, so I went straight to the source: FormTagLib.

Snippet from FormTagLib:

writer << "<select "
// process remaining attributes
outputAttributes(attrs, writer, true)

writer << '>'
writer.println()

As you can see, it's just a simple println method call:

Terminates the current line by writing the line separator string. The line separator string is defined by the system property line.separator, and is not necessarily a single newline character ('\n').

This is why it's important to use System.getProperty("line.separator").